Multitask Learning without Label Correspondences

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23 (NIPS 2010)

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Authors

Novi Quadrianto, James Petterson, Tibério Caetano, Alex Smola, S.v.n. Vishwanathan

Abstract

We propose an algorithm to perform multitask learning where each task has potentially distinct label sets and label correspondences are not readily available. This is in contrast with existing methods which either assume that the label sets shared by different tasks are the same or that there exists a label mapping oracle. Our method directly maximizes the mutual information among the labels, and we show that the resulting objective function can be efficiently optimized using existing algorithms. Our proposed approach has a direct application for data integration with different label spaces for the purpose of classification, such as integrating Yahoo! and DMOZ web directories.