Universal Representations: A Unified Look at Multiple Task and Domain Learning
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Abstract (arXiv)
We propose a unified look at jointly learning multiple vision tasks and visual domains through universal representations, a single deep neural network. Learning multiple problems simultaneously involves minimizing a weighted sum of multiple loss functions with different magnitudes and characteristics and thus results in unbalanced state of one loss dominating the optimization and poor results compared to learning a separate model for each problem. To this end, we propose distilling knowledge of multiple task/domain-specific networks into a single deep neural network after aligning its representations with the task/domain-specific ones through small capacity adapters. We rigorously show that universal representations achieve state-of-the-art performances in learning of multiple dense prediction problems in NYU-v2 and Cityscapes, multiple image classification problems from diverse domains in Visual Decathlon Dataset and cross-domain few-shot learning in MetaDataset. Finally we also conduct multiple analysis through ablation and qualitative studies.
Key facts. Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 91 of its 130 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2022.
Builds on
91 of 130 references.
References · 91
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50 most cited of 91 All 91 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 2; 2023: 10; 2024: 3; 2025: 6; 2026: 2.
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- 2026Are We Really Doing Few-Shot Learning? A Critical Examination of Pre-Training Assumptionscited by 0
- 2026Are We Really Doing Few-Shot Learning? A Critical Examination of Pre-Training Assumptions9 Sep 2026
- 2026PRISM: Synergizing Vision Foundation Models via Self-organized Expert Specialization2 Jun 2026
- 20253D-Aware Multi-Task Learning with Cross-View Correlations for Dense Scene Understanding25 Nov 2025
- 2025Task-Level Contrastiveness for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning3 Oct 2025
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- 2023Independent Component Alignment for Multi-Task Learning30 May 2023
- 2023MetaMorphosis: Task-oriented Privacy Cognizant Feature Generation for Multi-task Learning13 May 2023
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- 2023Deep Learning for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Visual Recognition: A Survey15 Mar 2023
- 2022Learning useful representations for shifting tasks and distributions14 Dec 2022
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- 2023Independent Component Alignment for Multi-Task Learningcited by 70
- 2023InvPT++: Inverted Pyramid Multi-Task Transformer for Visual Scene Understandingcited by 22
- 2023Scalarization for Multi-Task and Multi-Domain Learning at Scalecited by 19
- 2025Gradient-Based Multi-Objective Deep Learning: Algorithms, Theories, Applications, and Beyondcited by 18
- 2024Tabular Data Augmentation for Machine Learning: Progress and Prospects of Embracing Generative AIcited by 15
- 2022Transferability-Guided Cross-Domain Cross-Task Transfer Learningcited by 14
- 2022Learning useful representations for shifting tasks and distributionscited by 14
- 2023Deep Learning for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Visual Recognition: A Surveycited by 14
- 2023TSP-Transformer: Task-Specific Prompts Boosted Transformer for Holistic Scene Understandingcited by 12
- 2023Efficient Computation Sharing for Multi-Task Visual Scene Understandingcited by 8
- 2023Multi-task Learning with 3D-Aware Regularizationcited by 8
- 2024Fine-tuning with Very Large Dropoutcited by 3
12 most cited of 19 All 19 (JSON)
- 2026Are We Really Doing Few-Shot Learning? A Critical Examination of Pre-Training Assumptions9 Sep 2026
- 20253D-Aware Multi-Task Learning with Cross-View Correlations for Dense Scene Understanding25 Nov 2025
- 2025Task-Level Contrastiveness for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning3 Oct 2025
- 2025Revisit the Imbalance Optimization in Multi-task Learning: An Experimental Analysis28 Sep 2025
- 2025FORLA: Federated Object-centric Representation Learning with Slot Attention3 Jun 2025
- 2025UniSTD: Towards Unified Spatio-Temporal Learning across Diverse Disciplines26 Mar 2025
- 2025Gradient-Based Multi-Objective Deep Learning: Algorithms, Theories, Applications, and Beyond19 Jan 2025
- 2024Tabular Data Augmentation for Machine Learning: Progress and Prospects of Embracing Generative AI31 Jul 2024
- 2024Fine-tuning with Very Large Dropout1 Mar 2024
- 2023TSP-Transformer: Task-Specific Prompts Boosted Transformer for Holistic Scene Understanding6 Nov 2023
- 2023Scalarization for Multi-Task and Multi-Domain Learning at Scale13 Oct 2023
- 2023Multi-task Learning with 3D-Aware Regularization2 Oct 2023
12 newest of 19 All 19 (JSON)