{"oa":1,"file":[{"relation":"main_file","creator":"system","access_level":"open_access","file_name":"IST-2017-776-v1+1_Pentina_Thesis_2016.pdf","date_updated":"2018-12-12T10:14:07Z","date_created":"2018-12-12T10:14:07Z","content_type":"application/pdf","file_id":"5056","file_size":2140062}],"article_processing_charge":"No","day":"01","pubrep_id":"776","author":[{"id":"42E87FC6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87","last_name":"Pentina","full_name":"Pentina, Anastasia","first_name":"Anastasia"}],"doi":"10.15479/AT:ISTA:TH_776","_id":"1126","file_date_updated":"2018-12-12T10:14:07Z","ddc":["006"],"department":[{"_id":"ChLa"}],"publist_id":"6234","type":"dissertation","supervisor":[{"full_name":"Lampert, Christoph","first_name":"Christoph","id":"40C20FD2-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87","last_name":"Lampert","orcid":"0000-0001-8622-7887"}],"status":"public","has_accepted_license":"1","degree_awarded":"PhD","project":[{"grant_number":"308036","name":"Lifelong Learning of Visual Scene Understanding","call_identifier":"FP7","_id":"2532554C-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425"}],"alternative_title":["ISTA Thesis"],"citation":{"short":"A. Pentina, Theoretical Foundations of Multi-Task Lifelong Learning, Institute of Science and Technology Austria, 2016.","chicago":"Pentina, Anastasia. “Theoretical Foundations of Multi-Task Lifelong Learning.” Institute of Science and Technology Austria, 2016. https://doi.org/10.15479/AT:ISTA:TH_776.","apa":"Pentina, A. (2016). Theoretical foundations of multi-task lifelong learning. Institute of Science and Technology Austria. https://doi.org/10.15479/AT:ISTA:TH_776","ama":"Pentina A. Theoretical foundations of multi-task lifelong learning. 2016. doi:10.15479/AT:ISTA:TH_776","ista":"Pentina A. 2016. Theoretical foundations of multi-task lifelong learning. Institute of Science and Technology Austria.","mla":"Pentina, Anastasia. Theoretical Foundations of Multi-Task Lifelong Learning. Institute of Science and Technology Austria, 2016, doi:10.15479/AT:ISTA:TH_776.","ieee":"A. Pentina, “Theoretical foundations of multi-task lifelong learning,” Institute of Science and Technology Austria, 2016."},"page":"127","user_id":"c635000d-4b10-11ee-a964-aac5a93f6ac1","date_created":"2018-12-11T11:50:17Z","date_published":"2016-11-01T00:00:00Z","language":[{"iso":"eng"}],"publication_status":"published","publisher":"Institute of Science and Technology Austria","title":"Theoretical foundations of multi-task lifelong learning","abstract":[{"lang":"eng","text":"Traditionally machine learning has been focusing on the problem of solving a single\r\ntask in isolation. While being quite well understood, this approach disregards an\r\nimportant aspect of human learning: when facing a new problem, humans are able to\r\nexploit knowledge acquired from previously learned tasks. Intuitively, access to several\r\nproblems simultaneously or sequentially could also be advantageous for a machine\r\nlearning system, especially if these tasks are closely related. Indeed, results of many\r\nempirical studies have provided justification for this intuition. However, theoretical\r\njustifications of this idea are rather limited.\r\nThe focus of this thesis is to expand the understanding of potential benefits of information\r\ntransfer between several related learning problems. We provide theoretical\r\nanalysis for three scenarios of multi-task learning - multiple kernel learning, sequential\r\nlearning and active task selection. We also provide a PAC-Bayesian perspective on\r\nlifelong learning and investigate how the task generation process influences the generalization\r\nguarantees in this scenario. In addition, we show how some of the obtained\r\ntheoretical results can be used to derive principled multi-task and lifelong learning\r\nalgorithms and illustrate their performance on various synthetic and real-world datasets."}],"ec_funded":1,"date_updated":"2023-09-07T11:52:03Z","publication_identifier":{"issn":["2663-337X"]},"month":"11","year":"2016","acknowledgement":"First and foremost I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Christoph\r\nLampert. Thank you for your patience in teaching me all aspects of doing research\r\n(including English grammar), for your trust in my capabilities and endless support. Thank\r\nyou for granting me freedom in my research and, at the same time, having time and\r\nhelping me cope with the consequences whenever I needed it. Thank you for creating\r\nan excellent atmosphere in the group, it was a great pleasure and honor to be a part of\r\nit. There could not have been a better and more inspiring adviser and mentor.\r\nI thank Shai Ben-David for welcoming me into his group at the University of Waterloo,\r\nfor inspiring discussions and support. It was a great pleasure to work together. I am\r\nalso thankful to Ruth Urner for hosting me at the Max-Planck Institute Tübingen, for the\r\nfruitful collaboration and for taking care of me during that not-so-sunny month of May.\r\nI thank Jan Maas for kindly joining my thesis committee despite the short notice and\r\nproviding me with insightful comments.\r\nI would like to thank my colleagues for their support, entertaining conversations and\r\nendless table soccer games we shared together: Georg, Jan, Amelie and Emilie, Michal\r\nand Alex, Alex K. and Alex Z., Thomas, Sameh, Vlad, Mayu, Nathaniel, Silvester, Neel,\r\nCsaba, Vladimir, Morten. Thank you, Mabel and Ram, for the wonderful time we spent\r\ntogether. I am thankful to Shrinu and Samira for taking care of me during my stay at the\r\nUniversity of Waterloo. Special thanks to Viktoriia for her never-ending optimism and for\r\nbeing so inspiring and supportive, especially at the beginning of my PhD journey.\r\nThanks to IST administration, in particular, Vlad and Elisabeth for shielding me from\r\nmost of the bureaucratic paperwork.\r\n\r\nThis dissertation would not have been possible without funding from the European\r\nResearch Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme\r\n(FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no 308036.","oa_version":"Published Version"}