arXiv:2601.21513cs.LG2026-01

在预算有限时,通过层级传递高效学习大量相关任务。

Cascaded Transfer: Learning Many Tasks under Budget Constraints

  • 构建树状结构按序传递模型参数,动态分配训练预算。
  • 在时间序列与图像分类任务中,精度优于现有方法,尤其在紧预算下提升显著。
  • 适合资源受限场景下的多任务学习,如分布式预测与联邦学习。

在分布式应用中,如变电站级能源需求预测或联邦学习,需由不同模型学习大量相关任务,但任务间关系未知。本文提出新型级联迁移学习(Cascaded Transfer Learning, CTL)范式,将模型参数沿根树结构层级传递,遵循全局训练预算。从源任务出发,树结构决定任务学习与优化顺序,预算沿分支分配。设计基于生成树的级联机制,连接所有任务,以最小化包含成对任务距离与可用预算的目标函数,生成几何感知且深度受限的迁移图。理论上刻画了级联路径上传递误差的累积与衰减规律:上游节点引入的误差经下游每次精炼被压缩,平衡树结构可限制误差累积。在合成与真实多任务场景、时间序列预测与图像分类上实验表明,相比其他方法,CTL在大规模任务集合中实现更精准且成本更低的适应,尤其在紧预算下收益最大。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

In distributed applications, such as energy demand forecasting at the substation level or federated learning, a large number of related tasks must be learned by different models, while the exact task relationships are unknown. We propose the novel Cascaded Transfer Learning (CTL) paradigm in which model parameters cascade hierarchically through tasks organized as a rooted tree, respecting a global training budget. Starting from a source task, the tree specifies the order in which tasks are learned and refined, with the budget allocated along its branches. We design cascade mechanisms based on spanning trees that connect all tasks by minimizing an objective combining pairwise task distances and the available training budget, which yield geometry-aware and depth-bounded transfer graphs. We theoretically characterize how transfer errors accumulate and attenuate along cascade paths: errors introduced at any upstream node are contracted by every downstream refinement, and balanced tree topologies bound this accumulation. Experiments on synthetic and real many-task settings, time-series forecasting and image classification, show that CTL enables more accurate and cost-effective adaptation across large task collections than alternative approaches, with the largest gains at the tightest budgets.

多任务学习迁移学习预算约束层级结构

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