# Multi-task Learning with Sample Re-weighting for Machine Reading Comprehension

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06963 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06963/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [PaCo: Parameter-Compositional Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11653/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Multi-task Learning in Natural Language Processing: Regarding Task Relatedness and Training Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03508/) (2022)
- [Turning Tables: Generating Examples from Semi-structured Tables for Endowing Language Models with Reasoning Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07261/) (2021)
- [Single-dataset Experts for Multi-dataset Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13880/) (2021)
- [It Is Not About What You Say, It Is About How You Say It: A Surprisingly Simple Approach for Improving Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16779/) (2024)
- [TL-GAN: Improving Traffic Light Recognition via Data Synthesis for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15006/) (2022)
- [Deep Understanding based Multi-Document Machine Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03494/) (2022)
- [DomainInv: Domain Invariant Fine Tuning and Adversarial Label Correction For QA Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05589/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a multi-task learning framework to learn a joint Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) model that can be applied to a wide range of MRC tasks in different domains. Inspired by recent ideas of data selection in machine translation, we develop a novel sample re-weighting scheme to assign sample-specific weights to the loss. Empirical study shows that our approach can be applied to many existing MRC models. Combined with contextual representations from pre-trained language models (such as ELMo), we achieve new state-of-the-art results on a set of MRC benchmark datasets. We release our code at https://github.com/xycforgithub/MultiTask-MRC.