GCond: Gradient Conflict Resolution via Accumulation-based Stabilization for Large-Scale Multi-Task Learning

Abstract

In multi-task learning (MTL), gradient conflict poses a significant challenge. Effective methods for addressing this problem, including PCGrad, CAGrad, and GradNorm, in their original implementations are computationally demanding, which significantly limits their application in modern large models such as transformers. We propose Gradient Conductor (GCond), a method that builds upon PCGrad principles by combining them with gradient accumulation and an adaptive arbitration mechanism. We evaluated GCond on self-supervised multi-task learning tasks using MobileNetV3-Small and ConvNeXt architectures on the ImageNet 1K dataset and a combined head and neck CT scan dataset, comparing the proposed method against baseline linear combinations and state-of-the-art gradient conflict resolution methods. The classical and stochastic approaches of GCond were analyzed. The stochastic mode of GCond achieved a two-fold computational speedup while maintaining optimization quality, and demonstrated superior performance across all evaluated metrics, achieving lower L1 and SSIM losses compared to other methods on both datasets, and demonstrating superior generalization in heterogeneous scenarios: GCond improved ImageNet Top-1 Accuracy by 4.5% over baselines and prevented confidence overfitting in medical diagnosis tasks. GCond exhibited high scalability, being successfully applied to both compact models: MobileNetV3-Small and ConvNeXt-tiny; and large architecture ConvNeXtV2-Base. It also showed compatibility with modern optimizers such as AdamW and Lion/LARS. Therefore, GCond offers a scalable and efficient solution to the problem of gradient conflicts in multi-task learning.