A Learnable Skill Combination Strategy for Multi-task Learning in Natural Language Understanding

In the realm of domain-specific natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, acquiring high-quality labeled data is often arduous, thereby posing significant challenges for effective model training. Multi-task learning (MTL) addresses these limitations by jointly optimizing multiple tasks within a unified framework. In this paper, we introduce a novel sparse NLU multi-task learning framework that decomposes the language model into modular skill components and employs a dynamic, learnable skillcombination mechanism to adaptively handle diverse tasks. Extensive experiments on benchmark NLU datasets demonstrate that our proposed method surpasses conventional multitask learning approaches in performance.