The key motivation behind multi-task optimization is that if optimization tasks are related to each other in terms of their optimal solutions or the general characteristics of their function landscapes,[5] the search progress can be transferred to substantially accelerate the search on the other.
The success of the paradigm is not necessarily limited to one-way knowledge transfers from simpler to more complex tasks. In practice an attempt is to intentionally solve a more difficult task that may unintentionally solve several smaller problems.[6]
^Gupta, Abhishek; Ong, Yew-Soon; Feng, Liang (2018). "Insights on Transfer Optimization: Because Experience is the Best Teacher". IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence. 2: 51–64. doi:10.1109/TETCI.2017.2769104. hdl:10356/147980. S2CID11510470.
^Pan, Sinno Jialin; Yang, Qiang (2010). "A Survey on Transfer Learning". IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. 22 (10): 1345–1359. doi:10.1109/TKDE.2009.191. S2CID740063.
^Caruana, R., "Multitask Learning", pp. 95-134 in Sebastian Thrun, Lorien Pratt (eds.) Learning to Learn, (1998) Springer ISBN9780792380474
^Cabi, Serkan; Sergio Gómez Colmenarejo; Hoffman, Matthew W.; Denil, Misha; Wang, Ziyu; Nando de Freitas (2017). "The Intentional Unintentional Agent: Learning to Solve Many Continuous Control Tasks Simultaneously". arXiv:1707.03300 [cs.AI].
^J. -Y. Li, Z. -H. Zhan, Y. Li and J. Zhang, "Multiple Tasks for Multiple Objectives: A New Multiobjective Optimization Method via Multitask Optimization," in IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, doi:10.1109/TEVC.2023.3294307