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: Due to their complex nature, it is hard to characterize the ways in which machine learning models can misbehave or be exploited when deployed. Recent work on adversarial examples, i.e. inputs with minor perturbations that result in substantially different model predictions, is helpful in evaluating the robustness of these models by exposing the adversarial scenarios where they fail. However, these malicious perturbations are often unnatural, not semantically meaningful, and not applicable to complicated domains such as language. In this paper, we propose a framework to generate natural and legible adversarial examples that lie on the data manifold, by searching in semantic space of dense and continuous data representation, utilizing the recent advances in generative adversarial networks. We present generated adversaries to demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach for black-box classifiers for a wide range of applications such as image classification, textual entailment, and machine translation. We include experiments to show that the generated adversaries are natural, legible to humans, and useful in evaluating and analyzing black-box classifiers.

SOLUTION: We propose a framework to generate “natural” adversaries against black-box classifiers for both visual and textual domains, by doing the search for adversaries in the latent semantic space.

PROBLEM: Driven by the need for parallelizable hyperparameter optimization methods, this paper studies \emph{open loop} search methods: sequences that are predetermined and can be generated before a single configuration is evaluated. Examples include grid search, uniform random search, low discrepancy sequences, and other sampling distributions.
 In particular, we propose the use of $k$-determinantal point processes in  hyperparameter optimization via random search. Compared to conventional uniform random search where hyperparameter settings are sampled independently, a $k$-DPP promotes diversity.   We describe an approach that transforms hyperparameter search spaces for efficient use with a $k$-DPP. In addition, we introduce a novel Metropolis-Hastings algorithm which can sample from $k$-DPPs defined over spaces with a mixture of discrete and continuous dimensions. Our experiments show significant benefits over uniform random search  in realistic scenarios with a limited budget for training supervised learners, whether in serial or parallel.

SOLUTION: Driven by the need for parallelizable, open-loop hyperparameter optimization methods, we propose the use of $k$-determinantal point processes in  hyperparameter optimization via random search.

PROBLEM: Answering questions about a text frequently requires aggregating information from multiple places in that text. End-to-end neural network models, the dominant approach in the current literature, can theoretically learn how to distill and manipulate representations of the text without explicit supervision about how to do so. We investigate a canonical architecture for this task, the memory network, and analyze how effective it really is in the context of three multi-hop reasoning settings. In a simple synthetic setting, the path-finding task of the bAbI dataset, the model fails to learn the correct reasoning without additional supervision of its attention mechanism. However, with this supervision, it can perform well. On a real text dataset, WikiHop, the memory network gives nearly state-of-the-art performance, but does so without using its multi-hop capabilities. A tougher anonymized version of the WikiHop dataset is qualitatively similar to bAbI: the model fails to perform well unless it has additional supervision. We hypothesize that many "multi-hop" architectures do not truly learn this reasoning as advertised, though they could learn this reasoning if appropriately supervised.

SOLUTION:
Memory Networks do not learn multi-hop reasoning unless we supervise them.