CRLoMTL: Conflict-Resolution through Low-rank matrices for Multi-Task Learning
Ahmed Agiza, Tasneem Shaffee, Rahil Badkul, Sherief Reda
Abstract
Multi-task learning (MTL) improves model efficiency by sharing representations across related vision tasks, but it often suffers from negative transfer when task updates interfere with one another. Existing conflict-mitigation methods typically operate in gradient space, requiring explicit task-gradient manipulation and additional optimization steps. We propose Conflict-Resolution through Low-Rank Matrices for Multi-Task Learning (CRLoMTL), a parameter-efficient framework that mitigates task interference in the low-rank parameter-update space. CRLoMTL learns task-specific LoRA updates through task-specific passes, where each task updates its own low-rank matrices, and integrates these updates through global shared-subspace fusion. Specifically, we introduce a shared-subspace resolver based on singular value decomposition (SVD), referred to as the SVD resolver, which extracts a common low-dimensional orthonormal basis across task adapters and projects task updates into this shared space before merging them into a single deployment-time update. The resulting update can be folded into the backbone, preserving the inference structure of the original model without additional runtime branches. Experiments with Swin Transformer backbones on PASCAL-Context, NYUD-v2, and CelebA show that CRLoMTL achieves a favorable accuracy-parameter trade-off, improving over single-task baselines by up to 2.77% on PASCAL-Context, 5.03% on NYUD-v2, and 3.50% on CelebA, while training only a small fraction of the parameters used by single-task models.