Venue: ICLR 2017 workshop

Reviews:

final_score: rating: 6: Marginally above acceptance threshold
review_content: Some minor points / comments / questions:
- "As Neural Networks cannot directly model multiplicative interactions of their inputs": Why not? Isn't that a standard gating mechanism?
- "model parameters were instead obtained using the Normal Equation": That is unclear to me. What is the "Normal Equation"? In the next line, there is "X", but you never define what "X" is. The same for "R" and "C".
- The section about the arithmetic unit is very much too short. I don't really understand how it works. E.g. how do you perform the loop with repeated additions? How do you decide when to stop? That could work for integer values, but how does that work for float values? And how do you define it in a way that it is differentiable? Or is the arithmetic unit not differentiable w.r.t. its inputs?
- The question about differentiability should also be answered for all the other variables / intermediate values.
- The PC, I guess that is the address of the ARM code? I guess your branch instructions are conditional jumps, which will conditionally set the PC? How do you do that? Esp., how can that be differentiable? Or is it not differentiable? If it is not differentiable, how can you do training of the controller?
- You also don't really explain how you train the controller.

Cons:
- Some parts are unclear, very much too short.
- Experiment section very much too short.

Pros:
- Very nice idea and work.
- Open source implementation.

I really like the idea and the direction of this work but I think it needs some more improvements.

review_title: nice work

final_score: rating: 7: Good paper, accept
review_content: The paper is (necessarily) short and includes few experiments. On the other hand:
* it is very well written and clear,
* the idea to simulate a true ARM architecture is very nice,
* having it correct bytecode and test this is interesting,
* great accompanying website to showcase the results.

This is more than enough for a workshop acceptance, I hope these ideas will be developed further with more experiments and made into a full paper.
review_title: Short paper on a nice idea

Decision: Accept