AAAI 2026

January 22, 2026

Singapore, Singapore

Would you like to see your presentation here, made available to a global audience of researchers?
Add your own presentation or have us affordably record your next conference.

Multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL) seeks to learn a unified policy for diverse tasks, but often suffers from gradient conflicts across tasks. Existing masking-based methods attempt to mitigate such conflicts by assigning task-specific parameter masks. However, our empirical study shows that coarse-grained binary masks have the problem of over-suppressing key conflicting parameters, hindering knowledge sharing across tasks. Moreover, different tasks exhibit varying conflict levels, yet existing methods use a one-size-fits-all fixed sparsity strategy to keep training stability and performance, which proves inadequate. These limitations hinder the model’s generalization and learning efficiency.

To address these issues, we propose SoCo-DT, a Soft Conflict-resolution method based by parameter importance. By leveraging Fisher information, mask values are dynamically adjusted to retain important parameters while suppressing conflicting ones. In addition, we introduce a dynamic sparsity adjustment strategy based on the Interquartile Range (IQR), which constructs task-specific thresholding schemes using the distribution of conflict and harmony scores during training. To enable adaptive sparsity evolution throughout training, we further incorporate an asymmetric cosine annealing schedule to continuously update the threshold. Experimental results on the Meta-World benchmark show that SoCo-DT outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 7.6\% on MT50 and by 10.5\% on the suboptimal dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in mitigating gradient conflicts and improving overall multi-task performance.

Downloads

Paper

Next from AAAI 2026

Learning Neural Operators from Partial Observations via Latent Autoregressive Modeling
poster

Learning Neural Operators from Partial Observations via Latent Autoregressive Modeling

AAAI 2026

+3
Chang Gao and 5 other authors

22 January 2026

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

Select topic of interest (you can select more than one)

PRESENTATIONS

  • All Presentations
  • For Librarians
  • Resource Center
  • Free Trial
Underline Science, Inc.
1216 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001, USA

© 2025 Underline - All rights reserved