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: Data augmentation (DA) is fundamental against overfitting in large convolutional neural networks, especially with a limited training dataset. In images, DA is usually based on heuristic transformations, like geometric or color transformations. Instead of using predefined transformations, our work learns data augmentation directly from the training data by learning to transform images with an encoder-decoder architecture combined with a spatial transformer network. The transformed images still belong to the same class, but are new, more complex samples for the classifier. Our experiments show that our approach is better than previous generative data augmentation methods, and comparable to predefined transformation methods when training an image classifier.

SOLUTION: Automatic Learning of data augmentation using a GAN based architecture to improve an image classifier

PROBLEM: The conversion of scanned documents to digital forms is performed using an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. This work focuses on improving the quality of scanned documents in order to improve the OCR output. We create an end-to-end document enhancement pipeline which takes in a set of noisy documents and produces clean ones. Deep neural network based denoising auto-encoders are trained to improve the OCR quality. We train a blind model that works on different noise levels of scanned text documents. Results are shown for blurring and watermark noise removal from noisy scanned documents.

SOLUTION: We designed and tested a REDNET (ResNet Encoder-Decoder) with 8 skip connections to remove noise from documents, including blurring and watermarks, resulting in a high performance deep network for document image cleanup. 

PROBLEM: Imitation learning, followed by reinforcement learning algorithms, is a promising paradigm to solve complex control tasks sample-efficiently. However, learning from demonstrations often suffers from the covariate shift problem, which results
 in cascading errors of the learned policy. We introduce a notion of conservatively extrapolated value functions, which provably lead to policies with self-correction. We design an algorithm Value Iteration with Negative Sampling (VINS) that practically learns such value functions with conservative extrapolation. We show that VINS can correct mistakes of the behavioral cloning policy on simulated robotics benchmark tasks. We also propose the algorithm of using VINS to initialize a reinforcement learning algorithm, which is shown to outperform prior works in sample efficiency.

SOLUTION:
We introduce a notion of conservatively-extrapolated value functions, which provably lead to policies that can self-correct to stay close to the demonstration states, and learn them with a novel negative sampling technique.