# A Continual Development Methodology for Large-scale Multitask Dynamic ML Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07326 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07326/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 113 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00029/) (2017)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Progressive Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04671/) (2016)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06680/) (2019)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (2018)
- [Regularized Evolution for Image Classifier Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01548/) (2018)
- [GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06905/) (2021)
- [Efficient Neural Architecture Search via Parameter Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03268/) (2018)
- [GradNorm: Gradient Normalization for Adaptive Loss Balancing in Deep Multitask Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02257/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [LAMM: Language-Assisted Multi-Modal Instruction-Tuning Dataset, Framework, and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06687/) (2023)
- [RADAM: Texture Recognition through Randomized Aggregated Encoding of Deep Activation Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04554/) (2023)
- [Visual RAG: Expanding MLLM visual knowledge without fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10834/) (2025)
- [Learning Contrastive Self-Distillation for Ultra-Fine-Grained Visual Categorization Targeting Limited Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06056/) (2023)
- [A Multiagent Framework for the Asynchronous and Collaborative Extension of Multitask ML Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14745/) (2022)
- [Multipath agents for modular multitask ML systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02721/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Generalizability and Discriminability of Self-Supervised Learning from Evolutionary Game Theory Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00542/) (2024)
- [VORTEX: Challenging CNNs at Texture Recognition by using Vision Transformers with Orderless and Randomized Token Encodings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06368/) (2025)
- [Intelligent Character Recognition of Handwritten Forms with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08858/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The traditional Machine Learning (ML) methodology requires to fragment the development and experimental process into disconnected iterations whose feedback is used to guide design or tuning choices. This methodology has multiple efficiency and scalability disadvantages, such as leading to spend significant resources into the creation of multiple trial models that do not contribute to the final solution.The presented work is based on the intuition that defining ML models as modular and extensible artefacts allows to introduce a novel ML development methodology enabling the integration of multiple design and evaluation iterations into the continuous enrichment of a single unbounded intelligent system. We define a novel method for the generation of dynamic multitask ML models as a sequence of extensions and generalizations. We first analyze the capabilities of the proposed method by using the standard ML empirical evaluation methodology. Finally, we propose a novel continuous development methodology that allows to dynamically extend a pre-existing multitask large-scale ML system while analyzing the properties of the proposed method extensions. This results in the generation of an ML model capable of jointly solving 124 image classification tasks achieving state of the art quality with improved size and compute cost.