TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.
PROBLEM: Inspired by neurophysiological discoveries of navigation cells in the mammalian
 brain, we introduce the first deep neural network architecture for modeling Egocentric
 Spatial Memory (ESM). It learns to estimate the pose of the agent and
 progressively construct top-down 2D global maps from egocentric views in a spatially
 extended environment. During the exploration, our proposed ESM network
 model updates belief of the global map based on local observations using a recurrent
 neural network. It also augments the local mapping with a novel external
 memory to encode and store latent representations of the visited places based on
 their corresponding locations in the egocentric coordinate. This enables the agents
 to perform loop closure and mapping correction. This work contributes in the
 following aspects: first, our proposed ESM network provides an accurate mapping
 ability which is vitally important for embodied agents to navigate to goal locations.
 In the experiments, we demonstrate the functionalities of the ESM network in
 random walks in complicated 3D mazes by comparing with several competitive
 baselines and state-of-the-art Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)
 algorithms. Secondly, we faithfully hypothesize the functionality and the working
 mechanism of navigation cells in the brain. Comprehensive analysis of our model
 suggests the essential role of individual modules in our proposed architecture and
 demonstrates efficiency of communications among these modules. We hope this
 work would advance research in the collaboration and communications over both
 fields of computer science and computational neuroscience.

SOLUTION: first deep neural network for modeling Egocentric Spatial Memory inspired by neurophysiological discoveries of navigation cells in mammalian brain

PROBLEM: Generative modeling of high dimensional data like images is a notoriously difficult and ill-defined problem. In particular, how to evaluate a learned generative model is unclear.
 In this paper, we argue that *adversarial learning*, pioneered with generative adversarial networks (GANs), provides an interesting framework to implicitly define more meaningful task losses for unsupervised tasks, such as for generating "visually realistic" images. By relating GANs and structured prediction under the framework of statistical decision theory, we put into light links between recent advances in structured prediction theory and the choice of the divergence in GANs. We argue that the insights about the notions of "hard" and "easy" to learn losses can be analogously extended to adversarial divergences. We also discuss the attractive properties of parametric adversarial divergences for generative modeling, and perform experiments to show the importance of choosing a divergence that reflects the final task.

SOLUTION: Parametric adversarial divergences implicitly define more meaningful task losses for generative modeling, we make parallels with structured prediction to study the properties of these divergences and their ability to encode the task of interest.

PROBLEM: In representation learning (RL), how to make the learned representations easy to interpret and less overfitted to training data are two important but challenging issues. To address these problems, we study a new type of regularization approach that encourages the supports of weight vectors in RL models to have small overlap, by simultaneously promoting near-orthogonality among vectors and sparsity of each vector. We apply the proposed regularizer to two models: neural networks (NNs) and sparse coding (SC), and develop an efficient ADMM-based algorithm for regularized SC. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate that weight vectors learned under our regularizer are more interpretable and have better generalization performance.

SOLUTION:
We propose a new type of regularization approach that encourages non-overlapness in representation learning, for the sake of improving interpretability and reducing overfitting.