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.

Input: Consider Input: Predictive models that generalize well under distributional shift are often desirable and sometimes crucial to machine learning applications. One example is the estimation of treatment effects from observational data, where a subtask is to predict the effect of a treatment on subjects that are systematically different from those who received the treatment in the data. A related kind of distributional shift appears in unsupervised domain adaptation, where we are tasked with generalizing to a distribution of inputs that is different from the one in which we observe labels. We pose both of these problems as prediction under a shift in design. Popular methods for overcoming distributional shift are often heuristic or rely on assumptions that are rarely true in practice, such as having a well-specified model or knowing the policy that gave rise to the observed data. Other methods are hindered by their need for a pre-specified metric for comparing observations, or by poor asymptotic properties. In this work, we devise a bound on the generalization error under design shift, based on integral probability metrics and sample re-weighting. We combine this idea with representation learning, generalizing and tightening existing results in this space. Finally, we propose an algorithmic framework inspired by our bound and verify is effectiveness in causal effect estimation.

Output: A theory and algorithmic framework for prediction under distributional shift, including causal effect estimation and domain adaptation


Input: Consider Input: Dramatic advances in generative models have resulted in near photographic quality for artificially rendered faces, animals and other objects in the natural world. In spite of such advances, a higher level understanding of vision and imagery does not arise from exhaustively modeling an object,  but instead identifying higher-level  attributes  that  best  summarize  the  aspects  of  an  object.    In  this  work  we attempt  to  model  the  drawing  process  of  fonts  by  building  sequential generative models of vector graphics.   This model has the benefit of providing a scale-invariant representation for imagery whose latent representation may be systematically manipulated and exploited to perform style propagation. We demonstrate these results on a large dataset of fonts and highlight how such a model captures the statistical dependencies and richness of this dataset. We envision that our model can find use as a tool for designers to facilitate font design.

Output: We attempt to model the drawing process of fonts by building sequential generative models of vector graphics (SVGs), a highly structured representation of font characters.


Input: Consider Input: Regularization-based continual learning approaches generally prevent catastrophic forgetting by augmenting the training loss with an auxiliary objective. However in most practical optimization scenarios with noisy data and/or gradients, it is possible that stochastic gradient descent can inadvertently change critical parameters.
 In this paper, we argue for the importance of regularizing optimization trajectories directly. We derive a new co-natural gradient update rule for continual learning whereby the new task gradients are preconditioned with the empirical Fisher information of previously learnt tasks. We show that using the co-natural gradient systematically reduces forgetting in continual learning. Moreover, it helps combat overfitting when learning a new task in a low resource scenario.


Output: Regularizing the optimization trajectory with the Fisher information of old tasks reduces catastrophic forgetting greatly