Efficient Multi-task Prompt Tuning for Recommendation
<|reference_start|>Efficient Multi-task Prompt Tuning for Recommendation: With the expansion of business scenarios, real recommender systems are facing challenges in dealing with the constantly emerging new tasks in multi-task learning frameworks. In this paper, we attempt to improve the generalization ability of multi-task recommendations when dealing with new tasks. We find that joint training will enhance the performance of the new task but always negatively impact existing tasks in most multi-task learning methods. Besides, such a re-training mechanism with new tasks increases the training costs, limiting the generalization ability of multi-task recommendation models. Based on this consideration, we aim to design a suitable sharing mechanism among different tasks while maintaining joint optimization efficiency in new task learning. A novel two-stage prompt-tuning MTL framework (MPT-Rec) is proposed to address task irrelevance and training efficiency problems in multi-task recommender systems. Specifically, we disentangle the task-specific and task-sharing information in the multi-task pre-training stage, then use task-aware prompts to transfer knowledge from other tasks to the new task effectively. By freezing parameters in the pre-training tasks, MPT-Rec solves the negative impacts that may be brought by the new task and greatly reduces the training costs. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed multi-task learning framework. MPT-Rec achieves the best performance compared to the SOTA multi-task learning method. Besides, it maintains comparable model performance but vastly improves the training efficiency (i.e., with up to 10% parameters in the full training way) in the new task learning.<|reference_end|>
@article{bai2024efficient,
    title={Efficient Multi-task Prompt Tuning for Recommendation},
    author={Ting Bai, Le Huang, Yue Yu, Cheng Yang, Cheng Hou, Zhe Zhao, Chuan Shi},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.17214},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2408.17214},
    primaryClass={cs.IR}
}