A Convex Feature Learning Formulation for Latent Task Structure Discovery

This paper considers the multi-task learning problem and in the setting where some relevant features could be shared across few related tasks. Most of the existing methods assume the extent to which the given tasks are related or share a common feature space to be known apriori. In real-world applications however, it is desirable to automatically discover the groups of related tasks that share a feature space. In this paper we aim at searching the exponentially large space of all possible groups of tasks that may share a feature space. The main contribution is a convex formulation that employs a graphbased regularizer and simultaneously discovers few groups of related tasks, having closeby task parameters, as well as the feature space shared within each group. The regularizer encodes an important structure among the groups of tasks leading to an efficient algorithm for solving it: if there is no feature space under which a group of tasks has closeby task parameters, then there does not exist such a feature space for any of its supersets. An efficient active set algorithm that exploits this simplification and performs a clever search in the exponentially large space is presented. The algorithm is guaranteed to solve the proposed formulation (within some precision) in a time polynomial in the number of groups of related tasks discovered. Empirical results on benchmark datasets show that the proposed formulation achieves good generalization and outperforms state-of-the-art multi-task learning algorithms in some cases. Appearing in Proceedings of the 29 th International Conference on Machine Learning, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, 2012. Copyright 2012 by the author(s)/owner(s).