# Measuring Fine-Grained Relatedness in Multitask Learning via Data Attribution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21438 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21438/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02685/) (2019)
- [GradNorm: Gradient Normalization for Adaptive Loss Balancing in Deep Multitask Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02257/) (2017)
- [An Overview of Multi-Task Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05098/) (2017)
- [Taskonomy: Disentangling Task Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08328/) (2018)
- [Data Shapley: Equitable Valuation of Data for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02868/) (2019)
- [Estimating Training Data Influence by Tracing Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08484/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Multi-Task Learning with Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10704/) (2018)
- [LESS: Selecting Influential Data for Targeted Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04333/) (2024)
- [Conflict-Averse Gradient Descent for Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14048/) (2021)
- [Which Tasks Should Be Learned Together in Multi-task Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07553/) (2019)
- [Studying Large Language Model Generalization with Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03296/) (2023)
- [Dilated Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09914/) (2017)
- [TRAK: Attributing Model Behavior at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14186/) (2023)
- [Towards Efficient Data Valuation Based on the Shapley Value](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10275/) (2019)
- [Efficiently Identifying Task Groupings for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04617/) (2021)
- [Task2Vec: Task Embedding for Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03545/) (2019)
- [Just Pick a Sign: Optimizing Deep Multitask Models with Gradient Sign Dropout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06808/) (2020)
- [Representer Point Selection for Explaining Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09720/) (2018)
- [Data Mixing Laws: Optimizing Data Mixtures by Predicting Language Modeling Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16952/) (2024)
- [Gradient Vaccine: Investigating and Improving Multi-task Optimization in Massively Multilingual Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05874/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ATHENA: Accelerated Multi-Task Heterogeneous Influence Functions for Robot Data Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16208/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Measuring task relatedness and mitigating negative transfer remain a critical open challenge in Multitask Learning (MTL). This work extends data attribution -- which quantifies the influence of individual training data points on model predictions -- to MTL setting for measuring task relatedness. We propose the MultiTask Influence Function (MTIF), a method that adapts influence functions to MTL models with hard or soft parameter sharing. Compared to conventional task relatedness measurements, MTIF provides a fine-grained, instance-level relatedness measure beyond the entire-task level. This fine-grained relatedness measure enables a data selection strategy to effectively mitigate negative transfer in MTL. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed MTIF efficiently and accurately approximates the performance of models trained on data subsets. Moreover, the data selection strategy enabled by MTIF consistently improves model performance in MTL. Our work establishes a novel connection between data attribution and MTL, offering an efficient and fine-grained solution for measuring task relatedness and enhancing MTL models.