Learning to Route: Per-Sample Adaptive Routing for Multimodal Multitask Prediction
This addresses critical challenges in personalized healthcare by enabling per-subject adaptive information processing for applications like psychotherapy, though it appears incremental as a routing-based extension to existing multitask learning approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of multimodal multitask prediction with heterogeneous data by proposing a per-sample adaptive routing framework that dynamically selects modality processing pathways and task-sharing strategies. The method outperforms fixed multitask or single-task baselines on synthetic data and real-world psychotherapy notes for predicting depression and anxiety outcomes.
We propose a unified framework for adaptive routing in multitask, multimodal prediction settings where data heterogeneity and task interactions vary across samples. Motivated by applications in psychotherapy where structured assessments and unstructured clinician notes coexist with partially missing data and correlated outcomes, we introduce a routing-based architecture that dynamically selects modality processing pathways and task-sharing strategies on a per-sample basis. Our model defines multiple modality paths, including raw and fused representations of text and numeric features and learns to route each input through the most informative expert combination. Task-specific predictions are produced by shared or independent heads depending on the routing decision, and the entire system is trained end-to-end. We evaluate the model on both synthetic data and real-world psychotherapy notes predicting depression and anxiety outcomes. Our experiments show that our method consistently outperforms fixed multitask or single-task baselines, and that the learned routing policy provides interpretable insights into modality relevance and task structure. This addresses critical challenges in personalized healthcare by enabling per-subject adaptive information processing that accounts for data heterogeneity and task correlations. Applied to psychotherapy, this framework could improve mental health outcomes, enhance treatment assignment precision, and increase clinical cost-effectiveness through personalized intervention strategies.