MaxGNR: A Dynamic Weight Strategy via Maximizing Gradient-to-Noise Ratio for Multi-Task Learning

Caoyun Fan, Wenqing Chen, Jidong Tian, Yitian Li, Hao He, Yaohui Jin; Proceedings of the Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 2022, pp. 1178-1193

When modeling related tasks in computer vision, Multi-Task Learning (MTL) can outperform Single-Task Learning (STL) due to its ability to capture intrinsic relatedness among tasks. However, MTL may encounter the insufficient training problem, i.e., some tasks in MTL may encounter non-optimal situation compared with STL. A series of studies point out that too much gradient noise would lead to performance degradation in STL, however, in the MTL scenario, Inter-Task Gradient Noise (ITGN) is an additional source of gradient noise for each task, which can also affect the optimization process. In this paper, we point out ITGN as a key factor leading to the insufficient training problem. We define the Gradient-to-Noise Ratio (GNR) to measure the relative magnitude of gradient noise and design the MaxGNR algorithm to alleviate the ITGN interference of each task by maximizing the GNR of each task. We carefully evaluate our MaxGNR algorithm on two standard image MTL datasets: NYUv2 and Cityscapes. The results show that our algorithm outperforms the existing baselines under identical experimental conditions.