  A traditional and intuitively appealing Multi-Task Multiple Kernel Learning
(MT-MKL) method is to optimize the sum (thus, the average) of objective
functions with (partially) shared kernel function, which allows information
sharing amongst tasks. We point out that the obtained solution corresponds to a
single point on the Pareto Front (PF) of a Multi-Objective Optimization (MOO)
problem, which considers the concurrent optimization of all task objectives
involved in the Multi-Task Learning (MTL) problem. Motivated by this last
observation and arguing that the former approach is heuristic, we propose a
novel Support Vector Machine (SVM) MT-MKL framework, that considers an
implicitly-defined set of conic combinations of task objectives. We show that
solving our framework produces solutions along a path on the aforementioned PF
and that it subsumes the optimization of the average of objective functions as
a special case. Using algorithms we derived, we demonstrate through a series of
experimental results that the framework is capable of achieving better
classification performance, when compared to other similar MTL approaches.
