Multi-task learning deals with multiple related tasks simultaneously by sharing knowledge. In a typical deep multi-task learning model, all tasks use the same feature space and share the latent knowledge. If the tasks are weakly correlated or some features are negatively correlated, sharing all knowledge often leads to negative knowledge transfer among. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a Fisher sparse multi-task learning method. It can obtain a sparse sharing representation for each task. In such a way, tasks share features on a sparse subspace. Our method can ensure that the knowledge transferred among tasks is beneficial. Specifically, we first propose a sparse deep multi-task learning model, and then introduce Fisher sparse module into traditional deep multi-task learning to learn the sparse variables of task. By alternately updating the neural network parameters and sparse variables, a sparse sharing representation can be learned for each task. In addition, in order to reduce the computational overhead, an heuristic method is used to estimate the Fisher information of neural network parameters. Experimental results show that, comparing with other methods, our proposed method can improve the performance for all tasks, and has high sparsity in multi-task learning.

Multi-task learning uses knowledge transfer among tasks to improve the generalization performance of all tasks. For deep multi-task learning, knowledge transfer is often implemented via sharing all hidden features of tasks. A major shortcoming is that it can lead to negative knowledge transfer across tasks when task correlation is weak. To overcome it, this paper proposes an evolutionary method to learn sparse sharing representations adaptively. By embedding the neural network optimization into evolutionary multitasking, our proposed method finds an optimal combination of tasks and sharing features. It can identify negative correlation and redundant features and then remove them from the hidden feature set. Thus, an optimal sparse sharing subnetwork can be produced for each task. Experiment results show that the proposed method achieve better learning performance with a smaller inference model than other related methods.