The Parallel Transfer of Task Knowledge Using Dynamic Learning Rates Based on a Measure of Relatedness

With a distinction made between two forms of task knowledge transfer, representational and functional, jMTL, a modified version of the MTL method of functional (parallel) transfer, is introduced. The jMTL method employs a separate learning rate, j k , for each task output node k. j k varies as a function of a measure of relatedness, R k , between the kth task and the primary task of interest. Results of experiments demonstrate the ability of jMTL to dynamically select the most related source task(s) for the functional transfer of prior domain knowledge. The jMTL method of learning is nearly equivalent to standard MTL when all parallel tasks are sufficiently related to the primary task, and is similar to single task learning when none of the parallel tasks are related to the primary task. 1 Introduction The concepts and results presented here represent current work from our research into systems of artificial neural networks which use prior task knowledge to decrease the training t...