Overview

Multi-task learning studies how one model can learn several related predictions at once, using shared information to improve accuracy, data efficiency, or deployment cost. Common designs combine a shared encoder with task-specific heads, adapters, or routed experts; other methods balance losses, adjust conflicting gradients, or group tasks by affinity. Applications range from dense vision benchmarks such as NYUv2 and Cityscapes to language, medical prediction, recommendation, and scientific modeling. The central tension is positive versus negative transfer: sharing can help when tasks have useful common structure, but differences in data, objectives, or capacity can cause gains for some tasks and losses for others.

Latest papers

391 papers50 papers in the last four weeks, up 16% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Apr 10, 2026

Customized Fusion: A Closed-Loop Dynamic Network for Adaptive Multi-Task-Aware Infrared-Visible Image Fusion

Infrared-visible image fusion aims to integrate complementary information for robust visual understanding, but existing fusion methods struggle with simultaneously adapting to multiple downstream tasks. To address this issue, we propose a Closed-Loop Dynamic Network (CLDyN) that can adaptively respond to the semantic requirements of diverse downstream tasks for task-customized image fusion. Specifically, CLDyN introduces a closed-loop optimization mechanism that establishes a semantic transmission chain to achieve explicit feedback from downstream tasks to the fusion network through a Requirement-driven Semantic Compensation (RSC) module. The RSC module leverages a Basis Vector Bank (BVB) and an Architecture-Adaptive Semantic Injection (A2SI) block to customize the network architecture according to task requirements, thereby enabling task-specific semantic compensation and allowing the fusion network to actively adapt to diverse tasks without retraining. To promote semantic compensation, a reward-penalty strategy is introduced to reward or penalize the RSC module based on task performance variations. Experiments on the M3FD, FMB, and VT5000 datasets demonstrate that CLDyN not only maintains high fusion quality but also exhibits strong multi-task adaptability. The code is available at https://github.com/YR0211/CLDyN.
Apr 9, 2026

Information-Theoretic Requirements for Gradient-Based Task Affinity Estimation in Multi-Task Learning

Multi-task learning shows strikingly inconsistent results -- sometimes joint training helps substantially, sometimes it actively harms performance -- yet the field lacks a principled framework for predicting these outcomes. We identify a fundamental but unstated assumption underlying gradient-based task analysis: tasks must share training instances for gradient conflicts to reveal genuine relationships. When tasks are measured on the same inputs, gradient alignment reflects shared mechanistic structure; when measured on disjoint inputs, any apparent signal conflates task relationships with distributional shift. We discover this sample overlap requirement exhibits a sharp phase transition: below 30% overlap, gradient-task correlations are statistically indistinguishable from noise; above 40%, they reliably recover known biological structure. Comprehensive validation across multiple datasets achieves strong correlations and recovers biological pathway organization. Standard benchmarks systematically violate this requirement -- MoleculeNet operates at <5% overlap, TDC at 8-14% -- far below the threshold where gradient analysis becomes meaningful. This provides the first principled explanation for seven years of inconsistent MTL results.
Apr 8, 2026

Cognitive-Causal Multi-Task Learning with Psychological State Conditioning for Assistive Driving Perception

Multi-task learning for advanced driver assistance systems requires modeling the complex interplay between driver internal states and external traffic environments. However, existing methods treat recognition tasks as flat and independent objectives, failing to exploit the cognitive causal structure underlying driving behavior. In this paper, we propose CauPsi, a cognitive science-grounded causal multi-task learning framework that explicitly models the hierarchical dependencies among Traffic Context Recognition (TCR), Vehicle Context Recognition (VCR), Driver Emotion Recognition (DER), and Driver Behavior Recognition (DBR). The proposed framework introduces two key mechanisms. First, a Causal Task Chain propagates upstream task predictions to downstream tasks via learnable prototype embeddings, realizing the cognitive cascade from environmental perception to behavioral regulation in a differentiable manner. Second, Cross-Task Psychological Conditioning (CTPC) estimates a psychological state signal from driver facial expressions and body posture and injects it as a conditioning input to all tasks including environmental recognition, thereby modeling the modulatory effect of driver internal states on cognitive and decision-making processes. Evaluated on the AIDE dataset, CauPsi achieves a mean accuracy of 82.71% with only 5.05M parameters, surpassing prior work by +1.0% overall, with notable improvements on DER (+3.65%) and DBR (+7.53%). Ablation studies validate the independent contribution of each component, and analysis of the psychological state signal confirms that it acquires systematic task-label-dependent patterns in a self-supervised manner without explicit psychological annotations.
Apr 8, 2026

Joint Interference Detection and Identification via Adversarial Multi-task Learning

Precise interference detection and identification are crucial for enhancing the survivability of communication systems in non-cooperative wireless environments. While deep learning (DL) has advanced this field, existing single-task learning (STL) approaches neglect inherent task correlations. Furthermore, emerging multi-task learning (MTL) methods often lack a theoretical foundation for quantifying and modeling task relationships. To bridge this gap, we establish a theoretically grounded MTL framework for joint interference detection, modulation identification, and interference identification. First, we derive an upper bound for the weighted expected loss in MTL frameworks. This bound explicitly connects MTL performance to task similarity, quantified by the Wasserstein distance and learnable task relation coefficients. Guided by this theory, we present the adversarial multi-task interference detection and identification network (AMTIDIN), which integrates adversarial training to minimize distributional discrepancies across tasks and uses adaptive coefficients to model task correlations dynamically. Crucially, we conducted a quantitative analysis of task similarity to reveal intrinsic task relationships, specifically that modulation identification and interference identification share a substantial feature overlap distinct from interference detection. Experiments demonstrate that AMTIDIN outperforms its independently trained single-task counterparts and MTL baselines under the evaluated conditions of limited training data, short signal lengths, and low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs)
Apr 8, 2026

A Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning Approach through Multitask Prompt Distillation and Decomposition for Clinical NLP

Existing prompt-based fine-tuning methods typically learn task-specific prompts independently, imposing significant computing and storage overhead at scale when deploying multiple clinical natural language processing (NLP) systems. We present a multitask prompt distillation and decomposition framework that learns a single shared metaprompt from 21 diverse clinical source tasks and adapts it to unseen target tasks with fewer than 0.05% trainable parameters. Evaluated across five clinical NLP task types (named entity recognition, relation extraction, question answering, natural language inference, and summarization) on 10 held-out target datasets using three backbone models (LLaMA 3.1 8B, Meditron3 8B, gpt-oss 20B), our framework consistently outperforms LoRA by 1.51.7% despite using orders of magnitude fewer parameters, and exceeds single-task prompt tuning by 6.16.6%. The gpt-oss 20B model achieves the highest overall performance, particularly on clinical reasoning tasks. The strong zero- and few-shot performance demonstrates better transferability of the shared prompt representation.
Apr 8, 2026

When Does Context Help? A Systematic Study of Target-Conditional Molecular Property Prediction

We present the first systematic study of when target context helps molecular property prediction, evaluating context conditioning across 10 diverse protein families, 4 fusion architectures, data regimes spanning 67-9,409 training compounds, and both temporal and random evaluation splits. Using NestDrug, a FiLM-based architecture that conditions molecular representations on target identity, we characterize both success and failure modes with three principal findings. First, fusion architecture dominates: FiLM outperforms concatenation by 24.2 percentage points and additive conditioning by 8.6 pp; how you incorporate context matters more than whether you include it. Second, context enables otherwise impossible predictions: on data-scarce CYP3A4 (67 training compounds), multi-task transfer achieves 0.686 AUC where per-target Random Forest collapses to 0.238. Third, context can systematically hurt: distribution mismatch causes 10.2 pp degradation on BACE1; few-shot adaptation consistently underperforms zero-shot. Beyond methodology, we expose fundamental flaws in standard benchmarking: 1-nearest-neighbor Tanimoto achieves 0.991 AUC on DUD-E without any learning, and 50% of actives leak from training data, rendering absolute performance metrics meaningless. Our temporal split evaluation (train up to 2020, test 2021-2024) achieves stable 0.843 AUC with no degradation, providing the first rigorous evidence that context-conditional molecular representations generalize to future chemical space.
Apr 5, 2026

A Family of Open Time-Series Foundation Models for the Radio Access Network

The Radio Access Network (RAN) is evolving into a programmable and disaggregated infrastructure that increasingly relies on AI-native algorithms for optimization and closed-loop control. However, current RAN intelligence is still largely built from task-specific models tailored to individual functions, resulting in model fragmentation, limited knowledge sharing across tasks, poor generalization, and increased system complexity. To address these limitations, we introduce TimeRAN, a unified multi-task learning framework for time-series modeling in the RAN. TimeRAN leverages a lightweight time-series foundation model with few task-specific heads to learn transferable representations that can be efficiently adapted across diverse tasks with limited supervision. To enable large-scale pretraining, we further curate and open-source TimeRAN DataPile, the largest time-series corpus for RAN analytics to date, comprising over 355K time series and 0.56B measurements across diverse telemetry sources, protocol layers, and deployment scenarios. We evaluate TimeRAN across a comprehensive set of RAN analytics tasks, including anomaly detection, classification, forecasting, and imputation, and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance with minimal or no task-specific fine-tuning. Finally, we integrate TimeRAN into a proof-of-concept 5G testbed and demonstrate that it operates efficiently with limited resource requirements in real-world scenarios.
Apr 4, 2026

Task-Guided Multi-Annotation Triplet Learning for Remote Sensing Representations

Prior multi-task triplet loss methods relied on static weights to balance supervision between various types of annotation. However, static weighting requires tuning and does not account for how tasks interact when shaping a shared representation. To address this, the proposed task-guided multi-annotation triplet loss removes this dependency by selecting triplets through a mutual-information criteria that identifies triplets most informative across tasks. This strategy modifies which samples influence the representation rather than adjusting loss magnitudes. Experiments on an aerial wildlife dataset compare the proposed task-guided selection against several triplet loss setups for shaping a representation in an effective multi-task manner. The results show improved classification and regression performance and demonstrate that task-aware triplet selection produces a more effective shared representation for downstream tasks.
Apr 3, 2026

HyperCT: Low-Rank Hypernet for Unified Chest CT Analysis

Non-contrast chest CTs offer a rich opportunity for both conventional pulmonary and opportunistic extra-pulmonary screening. While Multi-Task Learning (MTL) can unify these diverse tasks, standard hard-parameter sharing approaches are often suboptimal for modeling distinct pathologies. We propose HyperCT, a framework that dynamically adapts a Vision Transformer backbone via a Hypernetwork. To ensure computational efficiency, we integrate Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), allowing the model to regress task-specific low-rank weight updates rather than full parameters. Validated on a large-scale dataset of radiological and cardiological tasks, \method{} outperforms various strong baselines, offering a unified, parameter-efficient solution for holistic patient assessment. Our code is available at https://github.com/lfb-1/HyperCT.
Apr 3, 2026

Task-Guided Prompting for Unified Remote Sensing Image Restoration

Remote sensing image restoration (RSIR) is essential for recovering high-fidelity imagery from degraded observations, enabling accurate downstream analysis. However, most existing methods focus on single degradation types within homogeneous data, restricting their practicality in real-world scenarios where multiple degradations often across diverse spectral bands or sensor modalities, creating a significant operational bottleneck. To address this fundamental gap, we propose TGPNet, a unified framework capable of handling denoising, cloud removal, shadow removal, deblurring, and SAR despeckling within a single, unified architecture. The core of our framework is a novel Task-Guided Prompting (TGP) strategy. TGP leverages learnable, task-specific embeddings to generate degradation-aware cues, which then hierarchically modulate features throughout the decoder. This task-adaptive mechanism allows the network to precisely tailor its restoration process for distinct degradation patterns while maintaining a single set of shared weights. To validate our framework, we construct a unified RSIR benchmark covering RGB, multispectral, SAR, and thermal infrared modalities for five aforementioned restoration tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that TGPNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on both unified multi-task scenarios and unseen composite degradations, surpassing even specialized models in individual domains such as cloud removal. By successfully unifying heterogeneous degradation removal within a single adaptive framework, this work presents a significant advancement for multi-task RSIR, offering a practical and scalable solution for operational pipelines. The code and benchmark will be released at https://github.com/huangwenwenlili/TGPNet.
Apr 2, 2026

MTLSI-Net: A Linear Semantic Interaction Network for Parameter-Efficient Multi-Task Dense Prediction

Multi-task dense prediction aims to perform multiple pixel-level tasks simultaneously. However, capturing global cross-task interactions remains non-trivial due to the quadratic complexity of standard self-attention on high-resolution features. To address this limitation, we propose a Multi-Task Linear Semantic Interaction Network (MTLSI-Net), which facilitates cross-task interaction through linear attention. Specifically, MTLSI-Net incorporates three key components: a Multi-Task Multi-scale Query Linear Fusion Block, which captures cross-task dependencies across multiple scales with linear complexity using a shared global context matrix; a Semantic Token Distiller that compresses redundant features into compact semantic tokens, distilling essential cross-task knowledge; and a Cross-Window Integrated attention Block that injects global semantics into local features via a dual-branch architecture, preserving both global consistency and spatial precision. These components collectively enable the network to capture comprehensive cross-task interactions at linear complexity with reduced parameters. Extensive experiments on NYUDv2 and PASCAL-Context demonstrate that MTLSI-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating its effectiveness and efficiency in multi-task learning.
Apr 2, 2026

Generalization Bounds and Statistical Guarantees for Multi-Task and Multiple Operator Learning with MNO Networks

Multiple operator learning concerns learning operator families {G[α]:U→V}α∈W\{G[α]:U\to V\}_{α\in W} indexed by an operator descriptor αα. Training data are collected hierarchically by sampling operator instances αα, then input functions uu per instance, and finally evaluation points xx per input, yielding noisy observations of G[α][u](x)G[α][u](x). While recent work has developed expressive multi-task and multiple operator learning architectures and approximation-theoretic scaling laws, quantitative statistical generalization guarantees remain limited. We provide a covering-number-based generalization analysis for separable models, focusing on the Multiple Neural Operator (MNO) architecture: we first derive explicit metric-entropy bounds for hypothesis classes given by linear combinations of products of deep ReLU subnetworks, and then combine these complexity bounds with approximation guarantees for MNO to obtain an explicit approximation-estimation tradeoff for the expected test error on new (unseen) triples (α,u,x)(α,u,x). The resulting bound makes the dependence on the hierarchical sampling budgets (nα,nu,nx)(n_α,n_u,n_x) transparent and yields an explicit learning-rate statement in the operator-sampling budget nαn_α, providing a sample-complexity characterization for generalization across operator instances. The structure and architecture can also be viewed as a general purpose solver or an example of a "small'' PDE foundation model, where the triples are one form of multi-modality.
Apr 2, 2026

FourierMoE: Fourier Mixture-of-Experts Adaptation of Large Language Models

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has emerged as a crucial paradigm for adapting large language models (LLMs) under constrained computational budgets. However, standard PEFT methods often struggle in multi-task fine-tuning settings, where diverse optimization objectives induce task interference and limited parameter budgets lead to representational deficiency. While recent approaches incorporate mixture-of-experts (MoE) to alleviate these issues, they predominantly operate in the spatial domain, which may introduce structural redundancy and parameter overhead. To overcome these limitations, we reformulate adaptation in the spectral domain. Our spectral analysis reveals that different tasks exhibit distinct frequency energy distributions, and that LLM layers display heterogeneous frequency sensitivities. Motivated by these insights, we propose FourierMoE, which integrates the MoE architecture with the inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT) for frequency-aware adaptation. Specifically, FourierMoE employs a frequency-adaptive router to dispatch tokens to experts specialized in distinct frequency bands. Each expert learns a set of conjugate-symmetric complex coefficients, preserving complete phase and amplitude information while theoretically guaranteeing lossless IDFT reconstruction into real-valued spatial weights. Extensive evaluations across 28 benchmarks, multiple model architectures, and scales demonstrate that FourierMoE consistently outperforms competitive baselines in both single-task and multi-task settings while using significantly fewer trainable parameters. These results highlight the promise of spectral-domain expert adaptation as an effective and parameter-efficient paradigm for LLM fine-tuning.
Apr 1, 2026

Model Merging via Data-Free Covariance Estimation

Model merging provides a way of cheaply combining individual models to produce a model that inherits each individual's capabilities. While some merging methods can approach the performance of multitask training, they are often heuristically motivated and lack theoretical justification. A principled alternative is to pose model merging as a layer-wise optimization problem that directly minimizes interference between tasks. However, this formulation requires estimating per-layer covariance matrices from data, which may not be available when performing merging. In contrast, many of the heuristically-motivated methods do not require auxiliary data, making them practically advantageous. In this work, we revisit the interference minimization framework and show that, under certain conditions, covariance matrices can be estimated directly from difference matrices, eliminating the need for data while also reducing computational costs. We validate our approach across vision and language benchmarks on models ranging from 86M parameters to 7B parameters, outperforming previous data-free state-of-the-art merging methods
Apr 1, 2026

TP-Seg: Task-Prototype Framework for Unified Medical Lesion Segmentation

Building a unified model with a single set of parameters to efficiently handle diverse types of medical lesion segmentation has become a crucial objective for AI-assisted diagnosis. Existing unified segmentation approaches typically rely on shared encoders across heterogeneous tasks and modalities, which often leads to feature entanglement, gradient interference, and suboptimal lesion discrimination. In this work, we propose TP-Seg, a task-prototype framework for unified medical lesion segmentation. On one hand, the task-conditioned adapter effectively balances shared and task-specific representations through a dual-path expert structure, enabling adaptive feature extraction across diverse medical imaging modalities and lesion types. On the other hand, the prototype-guided task decoder introduces learnable task prototypes as semantic anchors and employs a cross-attention mechanism to achieve fine-grained modeling of task-specific foreground and background semantics. Without bells and whistles, TP-Seg consistently outperforms specialized, general and unified segmentation methods across 8 different medical lesion segmentation tasks covering multiple imaging modalities, demonstrating strong generalization, scalability and clinical applicability.
Apr 1, 2026

RepUCB: Representation Learning-Based UCB for Heterogeneous Multi-Task Linear Bandits

Multi-task representation learning exploits the shared structure among related tasks by learning a common latent representation, thereby improving sample efficiency. This paper introduces a novel approach to multi-task representation learning in heterogeneous linear bandits. We consider TT concurrent heterogeneous linear bandit tasks, each with feature dimension dd, whose reward parameters share a common latent representation of dimension r≪min⁡{d,T}r \ll \min\{d, T\}, capturing the underlying task relatedness. We propose RepUCB, a novel Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm that leverages shared low-rank representations to enhance learning in a sample-efficient manner. Our algorithm first collects data through an exploration phase, estimates the shared representation, and then performs UCB-based learning on our proposed confidence set. We provide theoretical guarantees for the confidence set and prove that the unknown reward parameters lie within the confidence set with high probability. We derive cumulative regret bound and show that the proposed approach achieves O~(drNT)\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{drNT}), a significant improvement over solving the TT tasks independently, resulting in a regret of O~(dTN)\widetilde{O}(dT\sqrt{N}). We performed numerical simulations to validate the performance of our algorithm for different problem sizes and compared with baseline algorithms.
Mar 31, 2026

M2H-MX: Multi-Task Semantic and Geometric Perception for Real-Time Monocular 3D Scene Graph Construction

Monocular cameras are attractive for robotic perception due to their low cost and ease of deployment, yet achieving reliable real-time spatial understanding from a single image stream remains challenging. While recent multi-task dense prediction models have improved per-pixel depth and semantic estimation, translating these advances into stable monocular mapping systems is still non-trivial. This paper presents M2H-MX, a real-time multi-task perception model for monocular spatial understanding. The model preserves multi-scale feature representations while introducing register-gated global context and controlled cross-task interaction in a lightweight decoder, enabling depth and semantic predictions to reinforce each other under strict latency constraints. Its outputs integrate directly into an unmodified monocular SLAM pipeline through a compact perception-to-mapping interface. We evaluate both dense prediction accuracy and in-the-loop system performance. On NYUDv2, M2H-MX-L achieves state-of-the-art results, improving semantic mIoU by 6.6% and reducing depth RMSE by 9.4% over representative multi-task baselines. When deployed in a real-time monocular mapping system on ScanNet, M2H-MX reduces average trajectory error by 60.7% compared to a strong monocular SLAM baseline while producing cleaner metric-semantic maps. These results demonstrate that modern multi-task dense prediction can be reliably deployed for real-time monocular spatial perception in robotic systems.
Mar 26, 2026

Joint Learning Global-Local Speaker Classification to Enhance End-to-End Speaker Diarization and Recognition

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in end-to-end speaker diarization and recognition. However, their speaker discriminability remains limited due to the scarcity of large-scale conversational data and the absence of explicit speaker representation optimization. To address this, we propose GLSC-SDR, a paradigm that jointly trains speaker classification with diarization and recognition. We further introduce a Global-Local Speaker Classification strategy, which uses clustered speakers as global labels and re-encoded intra-cluster speakers as local labels. This hierarchical design enhances fine-grained speaker discrimination while preserving semantic transcription accuracy. Experiments on AliMeeting, AISHELL-4, and AMI-SDM demonstrate that GLSC-SDR achieves competitive or superior performance compared to simulation-based and multi-encoder approaches, without relying on large-scale real conversational data.
Mar 25, 2026

The role of spatial context and multitask learning in the detection of organic and conventional farming systems based on Sentinel-2 time series

Organic farming is a key element in achieving more sustainable agriculture. For a better understanding of the development and impact of organic farming, comprehensive, spatially explicit information is needed. This study presents an approach for the discrimination of organic and conventional farming systems using intra-annual Sentinel-2 time series. In addition, it examines two factors influencing this discrimination: the joint learning of crop type information in a concurrent task and the role of spatial context. A Vision Transformer model based on the Temporo-Spatial Vision Transformer (TSViT) architecture was used to construct a classification model for the two farming systems. The model was extended for simultaneous learning of the crop type, creating a multitask learning setting. By varying the patch size presented to the model, we tested the influence of spatial context on the classification accuracy of both tasks. We show that discrimination between organic and conventional farming systems using multispectral remote sensing data is feasible. However, classification performance varies substantially across crop types. For several crops, such as winter rye, winter wheat, and winter oat, F1 scores of 0.8 or higher can be achieved. In contrast, other agricultural land use classes, such as permanent grassland, orchards, grapevines, and hops, cannot be reliably distinguished, with F1 scores for the organic management class of 0.4 or lower. Joint learning of farming system and crop type provides only limited additional benefits over single-task learning. In contrast, incorporating wider spatial context improves the performance of both farming system and crop type classification. Overall, we demonstrate that a classification of agricultural farming systems is possible in a diverse agricultural region using multispectral remote sensing data.
Mar 25, 2026

Semantic Alignment across Ancient Egyptian Language Stages via Normalization-Aware Multitask Learning

We study word-level semantic alignment across four historical stages of Ancient Egyptian. These stages differ in script and orthography, and parallel data are scarce. We jointly train a compact encoder-decoder model with a shared byte-level tokenizer on all four stages, combining masked language modeling (MLM), translation language modeling (TLM), sequence-to-sequence translation, and part-of-speech tagging under a task-aware loss with fixed weights and uncertainty-based scaling. To reduce surface divergence we add Latin transliteration and IPA reconstruction as auxiliary views. We integrate these views through KL-based consistency and through embedding-level fusion. We evaluate alignment quality using pairwise metrics, specifically ROC-AUC and triplet accuracy, on curated Egyptian-English and intra-Egyptian cognate datasets. Translation yields the strongest gains. IPA with KL consistency improves cross-branch alignment, while early fusion demonstrates limited efficacy. Although the overall alignment remains limited, the findings provide a reproducible baseline and practical guidance for modeling historical languages under real constraints. They also show how normalization and task design shape what counts as alignment in typologically distant settings.
Mar 24, 2026

PolarAPP: Beyond Polarization Demosaicking for Polarimetric Applications

Polarimetric imaging enables advanced vision applications such as normal estimation and de-reflection by capturing unique surface-material interactions. However, existing applications (alternatively called downstream tasks) rely on datasets constructed by naively regrouping raw measurements from division-of-focal-plane sensors, where pixels of the same polarization angle are extracted and aligned into sparse images without proper demosaicking. This reconstruction strategy results in suboptimal, incomplete targets that limit downstream performance. Moreover, current demosaicking methods are task-agnostic, optimizing only for photometric fidelity rather than utility in downstream tasks. Towards this end, we propose PolarAPP, the first framework to jointly optimize demosaicking and its downstream tasks. PolarAPP introduces a feature alignment mechanism that semantically aligns the representations of demosaicking and downstream networks via meta-learning, guiding the reconstruction to be task-aware. It further employs an equivalent imaging constraint for demosaicking training, enabling direct regression to physically meaningful outputs without relying on rearranged data. Finally, a task-refinement stage fine-tunes the task network using the stable demosaicking front-end to further enhance accuracy. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PolarAPP outperforms existing methods in both demosaicking quality and downstream performance. Code is available upon acceptance.
Mar 24, 2026

Multitask-Informed Prior for In-Context Learning on Tabular Data: Application to Steel Property Prediction

Accurate prediction of mechanical properties of steel during hot rolling processes, such as Thin Slab Direct Rolling (TSDR), remains challenging due to complex interactions among chemical compositions, processing parameters, and resultant microstructures. Traditional empirical and experimental methodologies, while effective, are often resource-intensive and lack adaptability to varied production conditions. Moreover, most existing approaches do not explicitly leverage the strong correlations among key mechanical properties, missing an opportunity to improve predictive accuracy through multitask learning. To address this, we present a multitask learning framework that injects multitask awareness into the prior of TabPFN--a transformer-based foundation model for in-context learning on tabular data--through novel fine-tuning strategies. Originally designed for single-target regression or classification, we augment TabPFN's prior with two complementary approaches: (i) target averaging, which provides a unified scalar signal compatible with TabPFN's single-target architecture, and (ii) task-specific adapters, which introduce task-specific supervision during fine-tuning. These strategies jointly guide the model toward a multitask-informed prior that captures cross-property relationships among key mechanical metrics. Extensive experiments on an industrial TSDR dataset demonstrate that our multitask adaptations outperform classical machine learning methods and recent state-of-the-art tabular learning models across multiple evaluation metrics. Notably, our approach enhances both predictive accuracy and computational efficiency compared to task-specific fine-tuning, demonstrating that multitask-aware prior adaptation enables foundation models for tabular data to deliver scalable, rapid, and reliable deployment for automated industrial quality control and process optimization in TSDR.
Mar 23, 2026

mSFT: Addressing Dataset Mixtures Overfitting Heterogeneously in Multi-task SFT

Current language model training commonly applies multi-task Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) using a homogeneous compute budget across all sub-datasets. This approach is fundamentally sub-optimal: heterogeneous learning dynamics cause faster-learning tasks to overfit early while slower ones remain under-fitted. To address this, we introduce mSFT, an iterative, overfitting-aware search algorithm for multi-task data mixtures. mSFT trains the model on an active mixture, identifies and excludes the earliest overfitting sub-dataset, and reverts to that specific optimal checkpoint before continuing. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that mSFT consistently outperforms 4 baselines across 10 benchmarks and 6 base models. Further analysis confirms mSFT maintains robust gains across diverse dataset sizes, task granularities, and is insensitive to its single new hyperparameter (compute budget). Notably, at low compute budget, mSFT can improve performance while lowering training FLOPs. Ultimately, mSFT establishes a practical overfitting-aware algorithm for multi-task SFT that maximizes the potential of models across diverse data mixtures.
Mar 22, 2026

Frequency Switching Mechanism for Parameter-E!cient Multi-Task Learning

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to enable a single model to solve multiple tasks efficiently; however, current parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods remain largely limited to single-task adaptation. We introduce Free Sinewich, a parameter-efficient multi-task learning framework that enables near-zero-cost weight modulation via frequency switching (Free). Specifically, a Sine-AWB (Sinewich) layer combines low-rank factors and convolutional priors into a single kernel, which is then modulated elementwise by a sinusoidal transformation to produce task-specialized weights. A lightweight Clock Net is introduced to produce bounded frequencies that stabilize this modulation during training. Theoretically, sine modulation enhances the rank of low-rank adapters, while frequency separation decorrelates the weights of different tasks. On dense prediction benchmarks, Free Sinewich achieves state-of-the-art performance-efficiency trade-offs (e.g., up to +5.39% improvement over single-task fine-tuning with only 6.53M trainable parameters), offering a compact and scalable paradigm based on frequency-based parameter sharing. Project page: https://casperliuliuliu.github.io/projects/Free-Sinewich.
Mar 22, 2026

Representation-Level Adversarial Regularization for Clinically Aligned Multitask Thyroid Ultrasound Assessment

Thyroid ultrasound is the first-line exam for assessing thyroid nodules and determining whether biopsy is warranted. In routine reporting, radiologists produce two coupled outputs: a nodule contour for measurement and a TI-RADS risk category based on sonographic criteria. Yet both contouring style and risk grading vary across readers, creating inconsistent supervision that can degrade standard learning pipelines. In this paper, we address this workflow with a clinically guided multitask framework that jointly predicts the nodule mask and TI-RADS category within a single model. To ground risk prediction in clinically meaningful evidence, we guide the classification embedding using a compact TI-RADS aligned radiomics target during training, while preserving complementary deep features for discriminative performance. However, under annotator variability, naive multitask optimization often fails not because the tasks are unrelated, but because their gradients compete within the shared representation. To make this competition explicit and controllable, we introduce RLAR, a representation-level adversarial gradient regularizer. Rather than performing parameter-level gradient surgery, RLAR uses each task's normalized adversarial direction in latent space as a geometric probe of task sensitivity and penalizes excessive angular alignment between task-specific adversarial directions. On a public TI-RADS dataset, our clinically guided multitask model with RLAR consistently improves risk stratification while maintaining segmentation quality compared to single-task training and conventional multitask baselines. Code and pretrained models will be released.
Mar 21, 2026

Mamba Learns in Context: Structure-Aware Domain Generalization for Multi-Task Point Cloud Understanding

While recent Transformer and Mamba architectures have advanced point cloud representation learning, they are typically developed for single-task or single-domain settings. Directly applying them to multi-task domain generalization (DG) leads to degraded performance. Transformers effectively model global dependencies but suffer from quadratic attention cost and lack explicit structural ordering, whereas Mamba offers linear-time recurrence yet often depends on coordinate-driven serialization, which is sensitive to viewpoint changes and missing regions, causing structural drift and unstable sequential modeling. In this paper, we propose Structure-Aware Domain Generalization (SADG), a Mamba-based In-Context Learning framework that preserves structural hierarchy across domains and tasks. We design structure-aware serialization (SAS) that generates transformation-invariant sequences using centroid-based topology and geodesic curvature continuity. We further devise hierarchical domain-aware modeling (HDM) that stabilizes cross-domain reasoning by consolidating intra-domain structure and fusing inter-domain relations. At test time, we introduce a lightweight spectral graph alignment (SGA) that shifts target features toward source prototypes in the spectral domain without updating model parameters, ensuring structure-preserving test-time feature shifting. In addition, we introduce MP3DObject, a real-scan object dataset for multi-task DG evaluation. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach improves structural fidelity and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple tasks including reconstruction, denoising, and registration.
Mar 20, 2026

FAAR: Efficient Frequency-Aware Multi-Task Fine-Tuning via Automatic Rank Selection

Adapting models pre-trained on large-scale datasets is a proven way to reach strong performance quickly for down-stream tasks. However, the growth of state-of-the-art mod-els makes traditional full fine-tuning unsuitable and difficult, especially for multi-task learning (MTL) where cost scales with the number of tasks. As a result, recent studies investigate parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) using low-rank adaptation to significantly reduce the number of trainable parameters. However, these existing methods use a single, fixed rank, which may not be optimal for differ-ent tasks or positions in the MTL architecture. Moreover, these methods fail to learn spatial information that cap-tures inter-task relationships and helps to improve diverse task predictions. This paper introduces Frequency-Aware and Automatic Rank (FAAR) for efficient MTL fine-tuning. Our method introduces Performance-Driven Rank Shrink-ing (PDRS) to allocate the optimal rank per adapter location and per task. Moreover, by analyzing the image frequency spectrum, FAAR proposes a Task-Spectral Pyramidal Decoder (TS-PD) that injects input-specific context into spatial bias learning to better reflect cross-task relationships. Experiments performed on dense visual task benchmarks show the superiority of our method in terms of both accuracy and efficiency compared to other PEFT methods in MTL. FAAR reduces the number of parameters by up to 9 times compared to traditional MTL fine-tuning whilst improving overall performance. Our code is available.
Mar 20, 2026

End-to-End Multi-Task Learning for Adjustable Joint Noise Reduction and Hearing Loss Compensation

A multi-task learning framework is proposed for optimizing a single deep neural network (DNN) for joint noise reduction (NR) and hearing loss compensation (HLC). A distinct training objective is defined for each task, and the DNN predicts two time-frequency masks. During inference, the amounts of NR and HLC can be adjusted independently by exponentiating each mask before combining them. In contrast to recent approaches that rely on training an auditory-model emulator to define a differentiable training objective, we propose an auditory model that is inherently differentiable, thus allowing end-to-end optimization. The audiogram is provided as an input to the DNN, thereby enabling listener-specific personalization without the need for retraining. Results show that the proposed approach not only allows adjusting the amounts of NR and HLC individually, but also improves objective metrics compared to optimizing a single training objective. It also outperforms a cascade of two DNNs that were separately trained for NR and HLC, and shows competitive HLC performance compared to a traditional hearing-aid prescription. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that uses an auditory model to train a single DNN for both NR and HLC across a wide range of listener profiles.
Mar 20, 2026

A Multi-Task Targeted Learning Framework for Lithium-Ion Battery State-of-Health and Remaining Useful Life

Accurately predicting the state-of-health (SOH) and remaining useful life (RUL) of lithium-ion batteries is crucial for ensuring the safe and efficient operation of electric vehicles while minimizing associated risks. However, current deep learning methods are limited in their ability to selectively extract features and model time dependencies for these two parameters. Moreover, most existing methods rely on traditional recurrent neural networks, which have inherent shortcomings in long-term time-series modeling. To address these issues, this paper proposes a multi-task targeted learning framework for SOH and RUL prediction, which integrates multiple neural networks, including a multi-scale feature extraction module, an improved extended LSTM, and a dual-stream attention module. First, a feature extraction module with multi-scale CNNs is designed to capture detailed local battery decline patterns. Secondly, an improved extended LSTM network is employed to enhance the model's ability to retain long-term temporal information, thus improving temporal relationship modeling. Building on this, the dual-stream attention module-comprising polarized attention and sparse attention to selectively focus on key information relevant to SOH and RUL, respectively, by assigning higher weights to important features. Finally, a many-to-two mapping is achieved through the dual-task layer. To optimize the model's performance and reduce the need for manual hyperparameter tuning, the Hyperopt optimization algorithm is used. Extensive comparative experiments on battery aging datasets demonstrate that the proposed method reduces the average RMSE for SOH and RUL predictions by 111.3% and 33.0%, respectively, compared to traditional and state-of-the-art methods.
Mar 20, 2026

UniBioTransfer: A Unified Framework for Multiple Biometrics Transfer

Deepface generation has traditionally followed a task-driven paradigm, where distinct tasks (e.g., face transfer and hair transfer) are addressed by task-specific models. Nevertheless, this single-task setting severely limits model generalization and scalability. A unified model capable of solving multiple deepface generation tasks in a single pass represents a promising and practical direction, yet remains challenging due to data scarcity and cross-task conflicts arising from heterogeneous attribute transformations. To this end, we propose UniBioTransfer, the first unified framework capable of handling both conventional deepface tasks (e.g., face transfer and face reenactment) and shape-varying transformations (e.g., hair transfer and head transfer). Besides, UniBioTransfer naturally generalizes to unseen tasks, like lip, eye, and glasses transfer, with minimal fine-tuning. Generally, UniBioTransfer addresses data insufficiency in multi-task generation through a unified data construction strategy, including a swapping-based corruption mechanism designed for spatially dynamic attributes like hair. It further mitigates cross-task interference via an innovative BioMoE, a mixture-of-experts based model coupled with a novel two-stage training strategy that effectively disentangles task-specific knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, generalization, and scalability of UniBioTransfer, outperforming both existing unified models and task-specific methods across a wide range of deepface generation tasks. Project page is at https://scy639.github.io/UniBioTransfer.github.io/