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: In this paper, we explore meta-learning for few-shot text classification. Meta-learning has shown strong performance in computer vision, where low-level patterns are transferable across learning tasks. However, directly applying this approach to text is challenging–lexical features highly informative for one task maybe insignificant for another. Thus, rather than learning solely from words, our model also leverages their distributional signatures, which encode pertinent word occurrence patterns. Our model is trained within a meta-learning framework to map these signatures into attention scores, which are then used to weight the lexical representations of words. We demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms prototypical networks learned on lexical knowledge (Snell et al., 2017) in both few-shot text classification and relation classification by a significant margin across six benchmark datasets (19.96% on average in 1-shot classification).

SOLUTION: Meta-learning methods used for vision, directly applied to NLP, perform worse than nearest neighbors on new classes; we can do better with distributional signatures.

PROBLEM: We propose a framework for extreme learned image compression based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), obtaining visually pleasing images at significantly lower bitrates than previous methods. This is made possible through our GAN formulation of learned compression combined with a generator/decoder which operates on the full-resolution image and is trained in combination with a multi-scale discriminator. Additionally, if a semantic label map of the original image is available, our method can fully synthesize unimportant regions in the decoded image such as streets and trees from the label map, therefore only requiring the storage of the preserved region and the semantic label map. A user study confirms that for low bitrates, our approach is preferred to state-of-the-art methods, even when they use more than double the bits.

SOLUTION: GAN-based extreme image compression method using less than half the bits of the SOTA engineered codec while preserving visual quality

PROBLEM: When considering simultaneously a finite number of tasks, multi-output learning enables one to account for the similarities of the tasks via appropriate regularizers. We propose a generalization of the classical setting to a continuum of tasks by using vector-valued RKHSs.

SOLUTION:
We propose an extension of multi-output learning to a continuum of tasks using operator-valued kernels.