# Exceeding the Limits of Visual-Linguistic Multi-Task Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.13054 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13054/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02243/) (2019)
- [VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08530/) (2019)
- [An Overview of Multi-Task Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05098/) (2017)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [Deep Double Descent: Where Bigger Models and More Data Hurt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02292/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Multi-Task Learning with Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10704/) (2018)
- [ERNIE: Enhanced Language Representation with Informative Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07129/) (2019)
- [Unified Vision-Language Pre-Training for Image Captioning and VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11059/) (2019)
- [Unicoder-VL: A Universal Encoder for Vision and Language by Cross-modal Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06066/) (2019)
- [Reducing Transformer Depth on Demand with Structured Dropout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11556/) (2019)
- [Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11504/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Cold Start Streaming Learning for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04624/) (2022)
- [Bent & Broken Bicycles: Leveraging synthetic data for damaged object re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07883/) (2023)
- [Optimizing Small Transformer-Based Language Models for Multi-Label Sentiment Analysis in Short Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04982/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

By leveraging large amounts of product data collected across hundreds of live e-commerce websites, we construct 1000 unique classification tasks that share similarly-structured input data, comprised of both text and images. These classification tasks focus on learning the product hierarchy of different e-commerce websites, causing many of them to be correlated. Adopting a multi-modal transformer model, we solve these tasks in unison using multi-task learning (MTL). Extensive experiments are presented over an initial 100-task dataset to reveal best practices for "large-scale MTL" (i.e., MTL with more than 100 tasks). From these experiments, a final, unified methodology is derived, which is composed of both best practices and new proposals such as DyPa, a simple heuristic for automatically allocating task-specific parameters to tasks that could benefit from extra capacity. Using our large-scale MTL methodology, we successfully train a single model across all 1000 tasks in our dataset while using minimal task specific parameters, thereby showing that it is possible to extend several orders of magnitude beyond current efforts in MTL.