# Disentangling Shared and Task-Specific Representations from Multi-Modal Clinical Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03570 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03570/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [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)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [A Survey on Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08114/) (2017)
- [Revisiting Deep Learning Models for Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11959/) (2021)
- [Cross-stitch Networks for Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03539/) (2016)
- [Asymmetric Loss For Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14119/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-world clinical data is inherently multimodal, providing complementary evidence that mirrors the practical necessity of jointly assessing multiple related outcomes. Although multi-task learning can improve efficiency by sharing information across outcomes, existing approaches often fail to balance shared representation learning with outcome-specific modeling. Hard parameter sharing can trigger negative transfer when task gradients conflict, while flexible sharing may still entangle shared and task-specific signals. To address this, we propose a multi-task framework built on a unified Transformer for multimodal fusion, augmented with Orthogonal Task Decomposition (OrthTD) to split patient representations into shared and task-specific subspaces and impose a geometric orthogonality constraint to reduce redundancy and isolate task-specific signals. We evaluated OrthTD on a real-world cohort of 12,430 surgical patients for predicting four outcomes. OrthTD achieved average AUC (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) of 87.5% and average AUPRC (area under the precision-recall curve) of 37.2%, consistently outperformed advanced tabular and multi-task methods. Notably, OrthTD achieves substantial gains in AUPRC, indicating superior performance in identifying rare events within imbalanced clinical data. These results suggest that enforcing non-redundant shared and task-specific representations can improve multi-outcome prediction from multimodal clinical data.