CoAction: Cross-task Correlation-aware Pareto Set Learning

Pareto set learning (PSL) is an emerging paradigm in multi-objective optimization that trains neural networks to map preference vectors to Pareto optimal solutions. However, existing PSL methods primarily focus on solving a single multi-objective optimization problem at a time. This limitation not only increases computational costs in multi-objective multitask optimization scenarios by requiring a separate model for each task, but also fails to exploit the inter-task correlations across tasks. To address this, we propose a Cross-tAsk correlation-aware Pareto Set Learning (CoAction) framework, which leverages task-aware transformer to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. Specifically, by assigning task-specific embedding vectors to individual tasks, the model effectively distinguishes between tasks while facilitating knowledge sharing among them. We utilize a Transformer encoder as the backbone architecture to leverage its self-attention mechanism for capturing complex task dependencies. The proposed approach is evaluated on comprehensive multitask test suites covering both benchmark problems and real-world applications, demonstrating effectiveness and competitive performance in Hypervolume, Range, and Sparsity.

Detecting Autism Spectrum Disorder with Deep Eye Movement Features

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in social communication and behavioral patterns. Eye movement data offers a non-invasive diagnostic tool for ASD detection, as it is inherently discrete and exhibits short-term temporal dependencies, reflecting localized gaze focus between fixation points. These characteristics enable the data to provide deeper insights into subtle behavioral markers, distinguishing ASD-related patterns from typical development. Eye movement signals mainly contain short-term and localized dependencies. However, despite the widespread application of stacked attention layers in Transformer-based models for capturing long-range dependencies, our experimental results indicate that this approach yields only limited benefits when applied to eye movement data. This may be because discrete fixation points and short-term dependencies in gaze focus reduce the utility of global attention mechanisms, making them less efficient than architectures focusing on local temporal patterns. To efficiently capture subtle and complex eye movement patterns, distinguishing ASD from typically developing (TD) individuals, a discrete short-term sequential (DSTS) modeling framework is designed with Class-aware Representation and Imbalance-aware Mechanisms. Through extensive experiments on several eye movement datasets, DSTS outperforms both traditional machine learning techniques and more sophisticated deep learning models.

Iterative Prompt Relocation for Distribution-Adaptive Visual Prompt Tuning

Visual prompt tuning (VPT) provides an efficient and effective solution for adapting pre-trained models to various downstream tasks by incorporating learnable prompts. However, most prior art indiscriminately applies a fixed prompt distribution across different tasks, neglecting the importance of each block differing depending on the task. In this paper, we investigate adaptive distribution optimization (ADO) by addressing two key questions: (1) How to appropriately and formally define ADO, and (2) How to design an adaptive distribution strategy guided by this definition? Through in-depth analysis, we provide an affirmative answer that properly adjusting the distribution significantly improves VPT performance, and further uncover a key insight that a nested relationship exists between ADO and VPT. Based on these findings, we propose a new VPT framework, termed PRO-VPT (iterative Prompt RelOcation-based VPT), which adaptively adjusts the distribution building upon a nested optimization formulation. Specifically, we develop a prompt relocation strategy for ADO derived from this formulation, comprising two optimization steps: identifying and pruning idle prompts, followed by determining the optimal blocks for their relocation. By iteratively performing prompt relocation and VPT, our proposal adaptively learns the optimal prompt distribution, thereby unlocking the full potential of VPT. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposal significantly outperforms state-of-the-art VPT methods, e.g., PRO-VPT surpasses VPT by 1.6% average accuracy, leading prompt-based methods to state-of-the-art performance on the VTAB-1k benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/ckshang/PRO-VPT.

Collaborative Pareto Set Learning in Multiple Multi-Objective Optimization Problems

Pareto Set Learning (PSL) is an emerging research area in multi-objective optimization, focusing on training neural networks to learn the mapping from preference vectors to Pareto optimal solutions. However, existing PSL methods are limited to addressing a single Multi-objective Optimization Problem (MOP) at a time. When faced with multiple MOPs, this limitation not only leads to significant inefficiencies but also fails to exploit the potential synergies across varying MOPs. In this paper, we propose a Collaborative Pareto Set Learning (CoPSL) framework, which simultaneously learns the Pareto sets of multiple MOPs in a collaborative manner. CoPSL employs an architecture consisting of shared and MOP-specific layers, where shared layers aim to capture common relationships among MOPs collaboratively, and MOP-specific layers process these relationships to generate solution sets for each MOP. This collaborative approach enables CoPSL to efficiently learn the Pareto sets of multiple MOPs in a single run while leveraging the relationships among various MOPs. To further understand these relationships, we experimentally demonstrate that there exist shareable representations among MOPs. Leveraging these collaboratively shared representations can effectively improve the capability to approximate Pareto sets. Extensive experiments underscore the superior efficiency and robustness of CoPSL in approximating Pareto sets compared to state-of-the-art approaches on a variety of synthetic and real-world MOPs. Code is available at https://github.com/ckshang/CoPSL.