Aggregation and Pruning for Continuous Incremental Multi-Task Inference
Lining Li, Fenglin Cen, Quan Feng, Ji Hui Xu · Mathematics · 2025
In resource-constrained mobile systems, efficiently handling incrementally added tasks under dynamically evolving requirements is a critical challenge. To address this, we propose aggregate pruning (AP), a framework that combines pruning with filter aggregation to optimize deep neural networks for continuous incremental multi-task learning (MTL). The approach reduces redundancy by dynamically pruning and aggregating similar filters across tasks, ensuring efficient use of computational resources while maintaining high task-specific performance. The aggregation strategy enables effective filter sharing across tasks, significantly reducing model complexity. Additionally, an adaptive mechanism is incorporated into AP to adjust filter sharing based on task similarity, further enhancing efficiency. Experiments on different backbone networks, including LeNet, VGG, ResNet, and so on, show that AP achieves substantial parameter reduction and computational savings with minimal accuracy loss, outperforming existing pruning methods and even surpassing non-pruning MTL techniques. The architecture-agnostic design of AP also enables potential extensions to complex architectures like graph neural networks (GNNs), offering a promising solution for incremental multi-task GNNs.