{"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/recon-reducing-conflicting-gradients-from-the","title":"Recon: Reducing Conflicting Gradients from the Root for Multi-Task Learning","arxiv_id":"2302.11289","date":"2023-02-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Guangyuan Shi","Qimai Li","Wenlong Zhang","Jiaxin Chen","Xiao-Ming Wu"],"abstract":"A fundamental challenge for multi-task learning is that different tasks may conflict with each other when they are solved jointly, and a cause of this phenomenon is conflicting gradients during optimization. Recent works attempt to mitigate the influence of conflicting gradients by directly altering the gradients based on some criteria. However, our empirical study shows that ``gradient surgery'' cannot effectively reduce the occurrence of conflicting gradients. In this paper, we take a different approach to reduce conflicting gradients from the root. In essence, we investigate the task gradients w.r.t. each shared network layer, select the layers with high conflict scores, and turn them to task-specific layers. Our experiments show that such a simple approach can greatly reduce the occurrence of conflicting gradients in the remaining shared layers and achieve better performance, with only a slight increase in model parameters in many cases. Our approach can be easily applied to improve various state-of-the-art methods including gradient manipulation methods and branched architecture search methods. Given a network architecture (e.g., ResNet18), it only needs to search for the conflict layers once, and the network can be modified to be used with different methods on the same or even different datasets to gain performance improvement. The source code is available at https://github.com/moukamisama/Recon.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11289v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.11289v1.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":"recon-reducing-conflicting-gradients-from-the","repo_url":"https://github.com/moukamisama/recon","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"multi-task-learning","task_name":"Multi-Task Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2302.11289","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2302.11289","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2302.11289"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/moukamisama/Recon","reach":{"status":"ok"}},{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/moukamisama/recon","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"adf2dbd87e2095e8","entry":"add_args","repo":"moukamisama/Recon","repo_kind":"official","path":"scripts/train_cityscapes.py","file_url":"https://github.com/moukamisama/Recon/blob/HEAD/scripts/train_cityscapes.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"adf2dbd87e2095e8"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}