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: The tasks that an agent will need to solve often aren’t known during training. However, if the agent knows which properties of the environment we consider im- portant, then after learning how its actions affect those properties the agent may be able to use this knowledge to solve complex tasks without training specifi- cally for them. Towards this end, we consider a setup in which an environment is augmented with a set of user defined attributes that parameterize the features of interest. We propose a model that learns a policy for transitioning between “nearby” sets of attributes, and maintains a graph of possible transitions. Given a task at test time that can be expressed in terms of a target set of attributes, and a current state, our model infers the attributes of the current state and searches over paths through attribute space to get a high level plan, and then uses its low level policy to execute the plan. We show in grid-world games and 3D block stacking that our model is able to generalize to longer, more complex tasks at test time even when it only sees short, simple tasks at train time.


SOLUTION: Compositional attribute-based planning that generalizes to long test tasks, despite being trained on short & simple tasks.

PROBLEM: This work provides an automatic machine learning (AutoML) modelling architecture called Autostacker. Autostacker improves the prediction accuracy of machine learning baselines by utilizing an innovative hierarchical stacking architecture and an efficient parameter search algorithm. Neither prior domain knowledge about the data nor feature preprocessing is needed. We significantly reduce the time of AutoML with a naturally inspired algorithm - Parallel Hill Climbing (PHC). By parallelizing PHC, Autostacker can provide candidate pipelines with sufficient prediction accuracy within a short amount of time. These pipelines can be used as is or as a starting point for human experts to build on. By focusing on the modelling process, Autostacker breaks the tradition of following fixed order pipelines by exploring not only single model pipeline but also innovative combinations and structures. As we will show in the experiment section, Autostacker achieves significantly better performance both in terms of test accuracy and time cost comparing with human initial trials and recent popular AutoML system.

SOLUTION: Automate machine learning system with efficient search algorithm and innovative structure to provide better model baselines.

PROBLEM: In many domains, especially enterprise text analysis, there is an abundance of data which can be used for the development of new AI-powered intelligent experiences to improve people's productivity. However, there are strong-guarantees of privacy which prevent broad sampling and  labeling of personal text data to learn or evaluate models of interest. Fortunately, in some cases like enterprise email, manual annotation is possible on certain public datasets. The hope is that models trained on these public datasets would perform well on the target private datasets of interest. In this paper, we study the challenges of transferring information from one email dataset to another, for predicting user intent. In particular, we present approaches to characterizing the transfer gap in text corpora from both an intrinsic and extrinsic point-of-view, and evaluate several proposed methods in the literature for bridging this gap. We conclude with raising issues for further discussion in this arena.

SOLUTION:
Insights on the domain adaptation challenge, when predicting user intent in enterprise email.