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: We describe a novel way of representing a symbolic knowledge base (KB) called a sparse-matrix reified KB.   This representation enables neural modules that are fully differentiable, faithful to the original semantics of the KB, expressive enough to model multi-hop inferences, and scalable enough to use with realistically large KBs. The sparse-matrix reified KB can be distributed across multiple GPUs, can scale to tens of millions of entities and facts, and is orders of magnitude faster than naive sparse-matrix implementations.   The reified KB enables very simple end-to-end architectures to obtain competitive performance on several benchmarks representing two families of tasks: KB completion, and learning semantic parsers from denotations.

SOLUTION: A scalable differentiable neural module that implements reasoning on symbolic KBs.

PROBLEM: Human perception of 3D shapes goes beyond reconstructing them as a set of points or a composition of geometric primitives: we also effortlessly understand higher-level shape structure such as the repetition and reflective symmetry of object parts. In contrast, recent advances in 3D shape sensing focus more on low-level geometry but less on these higher-level relationships. In this paper, we propose 3D shape programs, integrating bottom-up recognition systems with top-down, symbolic program structure to capture both low-level geometry and high-level structural priors for 3D shapes. Because there are no annotations of shape programs for real shapes, we develop neural modules that not only learn to infer 3D shape programs from raw, unannotated shapes, but also to execute these programs for shape reconstruction. After initial bootstrapping, our end-to-end differentiable model learns 3D shape programs by reconstructing shapes in a self-supervised manner. Experiments demonstrate that our model accurately infers and executes 3D shape programs for highly complex shapes from various categories. It can also be integrated with an image-to-shape module to infer 3D shape programs directly from an RGB image, leading to 3D shape reconstructions that are both more accurate and more physically plausible.

SOLUTION: We propose 3D shape programs, a structured, compositional shape representation. Our model learns to infer and execute shape programs to explain 3D shapes.

PROBLEM: Deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely adopted in real-world cognitive applications because of their high accuracy. The robustness of DNN models, however, has been recently challenged by adversarial attacks where small disturbance on input samples may result in misclassification. State-of-the-art defending algorithms, such as adversarial training or robust optimization, improve DNNs' resilience to adversarial attacks by paying high computational costs. Moreover, these approaches are usually designed to defend one or a few known attacking techniques only. The effectiveness to defend other types of attacking methods, especially those that have not yet been discovered or explored, cannot be guaranteed. This work aims for a general approach of enhancing the robustness of DNN models under adversarial attacks. In particular, we propose Bamboo -- the first data augmentation method designed for improving the general robustness of DNN without any hypothesis on the attacking algorithms. Bamboo augments the training data set with a small amount of data uniformly sampled on a fixed radius ball around each training data and hence, effectively increase the distance between natural data points and decision boundary. Our experiments show that Bamboo substantially improve the general robustness against arbitrary types of attacks and noises, achieving better results comparing to previous adversarial training methods, robust optimization methods and other data augmentation methods with the same amount of data points.

SOLUTION:
The first data augmentation method specially designed for improving the general robustness of DNN without any hypothesis on the attacking algorithms.