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: Stochastic Gradient Descent or SGD is the most popular optimization algorithm for large-scale problems. SGD estimates the gradient by uniform sampling with sample size one. There have been several other works that suggest faster epoch wise convergence by using weighted non-uniform sampling for better gradient estimates. Unfortunately, the per-iteration cost of maintaining this adaptive distribution for gradient estimation is more than calculating the full gradient. As a result, the false impression of faster convergence in iterations leads to slower convergence in time, which we call a chicken-and-egg loop. In this paper, we break this barrier by providing the first demonstration of a sampling scheme, which leads to superior gradient estimation, while keeping the sampling cost per iteration similar to that of the uniform sampling. Such an algorithm is possible due to the sampling view of Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH), which came to light recently. As a consequence of superior and fast estimation, we reduce the running time of all existing gradient descent algorithms. We demonstrate the benefits of our proposal on both SGD and AdaGrad.

SOLUTION: We improve the running of all existing gradient descent algorithms.

PROBLEM: Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) can model natural language by sequentially ''reading'' input tokens and outputting a distributed representation of each token. Due to the sequential nature of RNNs, inference time is linearly dependent on the input length, and all inputs are read regardless of their importance. Efforts to speed up this inference, known as ''neural speed reading'', either ignore or skim over part of the input. We present Structural-Jump-LSTM: the first neural speed reading model to both skip and jump text during inference. The model consists of a standard LSTM and two agents: one capable of skipping single words when reading, and one capable of exploiting punctuation structure (sub-sentence separators (,:), sentence end symbols (.!?), or end of text markers) to jump ahead after reading a word.
 A comprehensive experimental evaluation of our model against all five state-of-the-art neural reading models shows that 
 Structural-Jump-LSTM achieves the best overall floating point operations (FLOP) reduction (hence is faster), while keeping the same accuracy or even improving it compared to a vanilla LSTM that reads the whole text.

SOLUTION: We propose a new model for neural speed reading that utilizes the inherent punctuation structure of a text to define effective jumping and skipping behavior.

PROBLEM: Long short-term memory networks (LSTMs) were introduced to combat vanishing gradients in simple recurrent neural networks (S-RNNs) by augmenting them with additive recurrent connections controlled by gates. We present an alternate view to explain the success of LSTMs: the gates themselves are powerful recurrent models that provide more representational power than previously appreciated. We do this by showing that the LSTM's gates can be decoupled from the embedded S-RNN, producing a restricted class of RNNs where the main recurrence computes an element-wise weighted sum of context-independent functions of the inputs. Experiments on a range of challenging NLP problems demonstrate that the simplified gate-based models work substantially better than S-RNNs, and often just as well as the original LSTMs, strongly suggesting that the gates are doing much more in practice than just alleviating vanishing gradients.

SOLUTION:
Gates do all the heavy lifting in LSTMs by computing element-wise weighted sums, and removing the internal simple RNN does not degrade model performance.