Papers › Learning Sparse Sharing Architectures for Multiple Tasks

Learning Sparse Sharing Architectures for Multiple Tasks

12 Nov 2019arXiv:1911.05034archive 2025-07-28

Tianxiang Sun, Yunfan Shao, Xiaonan Li, PengFei Liu, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang

Most existing deep multi-task learning models are based on parameter sharing, such as hard sharing, hierarchical sharing, and soft sharing. How choosing a suitable sharing mechanism depends on the relations among the tasks, which is not easy since it is difficult to understand the underlying shared factors among these tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel parameter sharing mechanism, named \emph{Sparse Sharing}. Given multiple tasks, our approach automatically finds a sparse sharing structure. We start with an over-parameterized base network, from which each task extracts a subnetwork. The subnetworks of multiple tasks are partially overlapped and trained in parallel. We show that both hard sharing and hierarchical sharing can be formulated as particular instances of the sparse sharing framework. We conduct extensive experiments on three sequence labeling tasks. Compared with single-task models and three typical multi-task learning baselines, our proposed approach achieves consistent improvement while requiring fewer parameters.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

choosewhatulike/sparse-sharing officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Multi-Task Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections