# Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.07115 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1,358 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 1358)

- [Conflict-Averse Gradient Descent for Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14048/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Training Dynamics of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02696/) (2023)
- [ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07601/) (2022)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment via Vision-Language Correspondence: A Multitask Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14968/) (2023)
- [MoGe-2: Accurate Monocular Geometry with Metric Scale and Sharp Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02546/) (2025)
- [Efficient Diffusion Training via Min-SNR Weighting Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09556/) (2023)
- [FIERY: Future Instance Prediction in Bird's-Eye View from Surround Monocular Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10490/) (2021)
- [Efficiently Identifying Task Groupings for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04617/) (2021)
- [Multi-Task Learning as a Bargaining Game](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01017/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Motion Prediction with Stacked Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11624/) (2021)
- [AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03375/) (2022)
- [Probabilistic and Geometric Depth: Detecting Objects in Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14160/) (2021)
- [Objects are Different: Flexible Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02323/) (2021)
- [FengWu: Pushing the Skillful Global Medium-range Weather Forecast beyond 10 Days Lead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02948/) (2023)
- [AM-RADIO: Agglomerative Vision Foundation Model -- Reduce All Domains Into One](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06709/) (2023)
- [CroCo v2: Improved Cross-view Completion Pre-training for Stereo Matching and Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10408/) (2022)
- [CLIP2Point: Transfer CLIP to Point Cloud Classification with Image-Depth Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01055/) (2022)
- [Geometry Uncertainty Projection Network for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13774/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning Through the Lens of Example Difficulty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09647/) (2021)
- [Rendezvous: Attention Mechanisms for the Recognition of Surgical Action Triplets in Endoscopic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03223/) (2021)
- [Multi-interactive Feature Learning and a Full-time Multi-modality Benchmark for Image Fusion and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02097/) (2023)
- [Simple-BEV: What Really Matters for Multi-Sensor BEV Perception?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07959/) (2022)
- [DRAMA: Joint Risk Localization and Captioning in Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10767/) (2022)
- [SimMTM: A Simple Pre-Training Framework for Masked Time-Series Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00861/) (2023)
- [Uncertainty-aware Joint Salient Object and Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02628/) (2021)
- [Gloss-free Sign Language Translation: Improving from Visual-Language Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14768/) (2023)
- [Reasonable Effectiveness of Random Weighting: A Litmus Test for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10603/) (2021)
- [SiT: Self-supervised vIsion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03602/) (2021)
- [M3ViT: Mixture-of-Experts Vision Transformer for Efficient Multi-task Learning with Model-Accelerator Co-design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14793/) (2022)
- [Representation Surgery for Multi-Task Model Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02705/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Numerous deep learning applications benefit from multi-task learning with multiple regression and classification objectives. In this paper we make the observation that the performance of such systems is strongly dependent on the relative weighting between each task's loss. Tuning these weights by hand is a difficult and expensive process, making multi-task learning prohibitive in practice. We propose a principled approach to multi-task deep learning which weighs multiple loss functions by considering the homoscedastic uncertainty of each task. This allows us to simultaneously learn various quantities with different units or scales in both classification and regression settings. We demonstrate our model learning per-pixel depth regression, semantic and instance segmentation from a monocular input image. Perhaps surprisingly, we show our model can learn multi-task weightings and outperform separate models trained individually on each task.