Representation Learning by Ranking under multiple tasks

In recent years, representation learning has become the research focus of the machine learning community. Large-scale pre-training neural networks have become the first step to realize general intelligence. The key to the success of neural networks lies in their abstract representation capabilities for data. Several learning fields are actually discussing how to learn representations and there lacks a unified perspective. We convert the representation learning problem under multiple tasks into a ranking problem, taking the ranking problem as a unified perspective, the representation learning under different tasks is solved by optimizing the approximate NDCG loss. Experiments under different learning tasks like classification, retrieval, multi-label learning, regression, self-supervised learning prove the superiority of approximate NDCG loss. Further, under the self-supervised learning task, the training data is transformed by data augmentation method to improve the performance of the approximate NDCG loss, which proves that the approximate NDCG loss can make full use of the information of the unsupervised training data.