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 address the problem of learning structured policies for continuous control. In traditional reinforcement learning, policies of agents are learned by MLPs which take the concatenation of all observations from the environment as input for predicting actions. In this work, we propose NerveNet to explicitly model the structure of an agent, which naturally takes the form of a graph. Specifically, serving as the agent's policy network, NerveNet first propagates information over the structure of the agent and then predict actions for different parts of the agent. In the experiments, we first show that our NerveNet is comparable to state-of-the-art methods on standard MuJoCo environments. We further propose our customized reinforcement learning environments for benchmarking two types of structure transfer learning tasks, i.e., size and disability transfer. We demonstrate that policies learned by NerveNet are significantly better than policies learned by other models and are able to transfer even in a zero-shot setting.


SOLUTION: using graph neural network to model structural information of the agents to improve policy and transferability 

PROBLEM: Many processes can be concisely represented as a sequence of events leading from a starting state to an end state. Given raw ingredients, and a finished cake, an experienced chef can surmise the recipe. Building upon this intuition,  we propose a new class of visual generative models: goal-conditioned predictors (GCP). Prior work on video generation largely focuses on prediction models that only observe frames from the beginning of the video. GCP instead treats videos as start-goal transformations, making video generation easier by conditioning on the more informative context provided by the first and final frames.  Not only do existing forward prediction approaches synthesize better and longer videos when modified to become goal-conditioned,  but GCP models can also utilize structures that are not linear in time, to accomplish hierarchical prediction . To this end, we study both auto-regressive GCP models and novel tree-structured GCP models that generate frames recursively, splitting the video iteratively into finer and finer segments delineated by subgoals . In experiments across simulated and real datasets, our GCP methods generate high-quality sequences over long horizons .  Tree-structured GCPs are also substantially easier to parallelize than auto-regressive GCPs, making training  and  inference  very  efficient, and allowing the model to train on sequences that are thousands of frames in length.Finally, we demonstrate the utility of GCP approaches for imitation learning in the setting without access to expert actions . Videos are on the supplementary website: https://sites.google.com/view/video-gcp

SOLUTION: We propose a new class of visual generative models: goal-conditioned predictors. We show experimentally that conditioning on the goal allows to reduce uncertainty and produce predictions over much longer horizons.

PROBLEM: Data Interpretation is an important part of Quantitative Aptitude exams and requires an individual to answer questions grounded in plots such as bar charts, line graphs, scatter plots, \textit{etc}. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in building models which can perform this task by learning from datasets containing triplets of the form \{plot, question, answer\}. Two such datasets have been proposed in the recent past which contain plots generated from synthetic data with limited (i) $x-y$ axes variables (ii) question templates and (iii) answer vocabulary and hence do not adequately capture the challenges posed by this task. To overcome these limitations of existing datasets, we introduce a new dataset containing $9.7$ million question-answer pairs grounded over $270,000$ plots with three main differentiators. First, the plots in our dataset contain a wide variety of realistic $x$-$y$ variables such as CO2 emission, fertility rate, \textit{etc. } extracted from  real word data sources such as World Bank, government sites, \textit{etc}. Second, the questions in our dataset are more complex as they are based on templates extracted from interesting questions asked by a crowd of workers using a fraction of these plots. Lastly, the answers in our dataset are not restricted to a small vocabulary and a large fraction of the answers seen at test time are not present in the training vocabulary. As a result, existing models for Visual Question Answering which largely use end-to-end models in a multi-class classification framework cannot be used for this task. We establish initial results on this dataset and emphasize the complexity of the task using a multi-staged modular pipeline with various sub-components to (i) extract relevant data from the plot and convert it to a semi-structured table (ii) combine the question with this table and use compositional semantic parsing to arrive at a logical form from which the answer can be derived. We believe that such a modular framework is the best way to go forward as it would enable the research community to independently make progress on all the sub-tasks involved in plot question answering.

SOLUTION:
We created a new dataset for data interpretation over plots and also propose a baseline for the same.