Sluice networks: Learning what to share between loosely related tasks

Multi-task learning is partly motivated by the observation that humans bring to bear what they know about related problems when solving new ones. Similarly, deep neural networks can profit from related tasks by sharing parameters with other networks. However, humans do not consciously decide to transfer knowledge between tasks (and are typically not aware of the transfer). In machine learning, it is hard to estimate if sharing will lead to improvements; especially if tasks are only loosely related. To overcome this, we introduce Sluice Networks, a general framework for multi-task learning where trainable parameters control the amount of sharing -- including which parts of the models to share. Our framework goes beyond and generalizes over previous proposals in enabling hard or soft sharing of all combinations of subspaces, layers, and skip connections. We perform experiments on three task pairs from natural language processing, and across seven different domains, using data from OntoNotes 5.0, and achieve up to 15% average error reductions over common approaches to multi-task learning. We analyze when the architecture is particularly helpful, as well as its ability to fit noise. We show that a) label entropy is predictive of gains in sluice networks, confirming findings for hard parameter sharing, and b) while sluice networks easily fit noise, they are robust across domains in practice.