Auxiliary Learning by Implicit Differentiation

Training with multiple auxiliary tasks is a common practice used in deep learning for improving the performance on the main task of interest. Two main challenges arise in this multi-task learning setting: (i) Designing useful auxiliary tasks; and (ii) Combining auxiliary tasks into a single coherent loss. We propose a novel framework, AuxiLearn, that targets both challenges, based on implicit differentiation. First, when useful auxiliaries are known, we propose learning a network that combines all losses into a single coherent objective function. This network can learn non-linear interactions between auxiliary tasks. Second, when no useful auxiliary task is known, we describe how to learn a network that generates a meaningful, novel auxiliary task. We evaluate AuxiLearn in a series of tasks and domains, including image segmentation and learning with attributes. We find that AuxiLearn consistently improves accuracy compared with competing methods.