Hierarchical task-aware multi-Head attention network

Publisher:
ACM
Publication Type:
Conference Proceeding
Citation:
SIGIR 2022 - Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2022, pp. 1933-1937
Issue Date:
2022-12-08
Full metadata record
Neural Multi-task Learning is gaining popularity as a way to learn multiple tasks jointly within a single model. While related research continues to break new ground, two major limitations still remain, including (i) poor generalization to scenarios where tasks are loosely correlated; and (ii) under-investigation on global commonality and local characteristics of tasks. Our aim is to bridge these gaps by presenting a neural multi-task learning model coined Hierarchical Task-aware Multi-headed Attention Network (HTMN). HTMN explicitly distinguishes task-specific features from task-shared features to reduce the impact caused by weak correlation between tasks. The proposed method highlights two parts: Multi-level Task-aware Experts Network that identifies task-shared global features and task-specific local features, and Hierarchical Multi-Head Attention Network that hybridizes global and local features to profile more robust and adaptive representations for each task. Afterwards, each task tower receives its hybrid task-adaptive representation to perform task-specific predictions. Extensive experiments on two real datasets show that HTMN consistently outperforms the compared methods on a variety of prediction tasks.
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: