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: Understanding the optimization trajectory is critical to understand training of deep neural networks. We show how the hyperparameters of stochastic gradient descent influence the covariance of the gradients (K) and the Hessian of the training loss (H) along this trajectory. Based on a theoretical model, we predict that using a high learning rate or a small batch size in the early phase of training leads SGD to regions of the parameter space with (1) reduced spectral norm of K, and (2) improved conditioning of K and H. We show that the point on the trajectory after which these effects hold, which we refer to as the break-even point, is reached early during training. We demonstrate these effects empirically for a range of deep neural networks applied to multiple different tasks. Finally, we apply our analysis to networks with batch normalization (BN) layers and find that it is necessary to use a high learning rate to achieve loss smoothing effects attributed previously to BN alone.

SOLUTION: In the early phase of training of deep neural networks there exists a "break-even point" which determines properties of the entire optimization trajectory.

PROBLEM: Pointwise localization allows more precise localization and accurate interpretability, compared to bounding box, in applications where objects are highly unstructured such as in medical domain. In this work, we focus on  weakly supervised localization (WSL) where a model is trained to classify an image and localize regions of interest at pixel-level using only global image annotation. Typical convolutional attentions maps are prune to high false positive regions. To alleviate this issue, we propose a new deep learning method for WSL, composed of a localizer and a classifier, where the localizer is constrained to determine relevant and irrelevant regions using conditional entropy (CE) with the aim to reduce false positive regions. Experimental results on a public medical dataset and two natural datasets, using Dice index, show that, compared to state of the art WSL methods, our proposal can provide significant improvements in terms of image-level classification and pixel-level localization (low false positive) with robustness to overfitting. A public reproducible PyTorch implementation is provided.

SOLUTION: A deep learning method for weakly-supervised pointwise localization that learns using image-level label only. It relies on conditional entropy to localize relevant and irrelevant regions aiming to minimize false positive regions.

PROBLEM: We present a meta-learning approach for adaptive text-to-speech (TTS) with few data. During training, we learn a multi-speaker model using a shared conditional WaveNet core and independent learned embeddings for each speaker. The aim of training is not to produce a neural network with fixed weights, which is then deployed as a TTS system. Instead, the aim is to produce a network that requires few data at deployment time to rapidly adapt to new speakers. We introduce and benchmark three strategies:
 (i) learning the speaker embedding while keeping the WaveNet core fixed,
 (ii) fine-tuning the entire architecture with stochastic gradient descent, and
 (iii) predicting the speaker embedding with a trained neural network encoder.
 The experiments show that these approaches are successful at adapting the multi-speaker neural network to new speakers, obtaining state-of-the-art results in both sample naturalness and voice similarity with merely a few minutes of audio data from new speakers.

SOLUTION:
Sample efficient algorithms to adapt a text-to-speech model to a new voice style with the state-of-the-art performance.