{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/eliciting-transferability-in-multi-task","title":"Eliciting and Understanding Cross-Task Skills with Task-Level Mixture-of-Experts","arxiv_id":"2205.12701","date":"2022-05-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Qinyuan Ye","Juan Zha","Xiang Ren"],"abstract":"Recent works suggest that transformer models are capable of multi-tasking on diverse NLP tasks and adapting to new tasks efficiently. However, the potential of these multi-task models may be limited as they use the same set of parameters for all tasks. In contrast, humans tackle tasks in a more flexible way, by making proper presumptions on what skills and knowledge are relevant and executing only the necessary computations. Inspired by this, we propose to use task-level mixture-of-expert models, which has a collection of transformer layers (i.e., experts) and a router component that chooses from these experts dynamically and flexibly. We find that these models help improve the average performance gain (ARG) metric by 2.6% when adapting to unseen tasks in the few-shot setting and by 5.6% in the zero-shot generalization setting. Further, we show that the learned routing decisions partly rediscover human categorization of NLP tasks -- certain experts are strongly associated with extractive tasks, some with classification tasks, and some with tasks requiring world knowledge.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.12701v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.12701v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"eliciting-transferability-in-multi-task","repo_url":"https://github.com/ink-usc/crosstaskmoe","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"mixture-of-experts","task_name":"Mixture-of-Experts"},{"task_slug":"multi-task-learning","task_name":"Multi-Task Learning"},{"task_slug":"world-knowledge","task_name":"World Knowledge"},{"task_slug":"zero-shot-generalization","task_name":"Zero-shot Generalization"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2205.12701","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}