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.

Neural networks with low-precision weights and activations offer compelling
 efficiency advantages over their full-precision equivalents. The two most
 frequently discussed benefits of quantization are reduced memory consumption,
 and a faster forward pass when implemented with efficient bitwise
 operations. We propose a third benefit of very low-precision neural networks:
 improved robustness against some adversarial attacks, and in the worst case,
 performance that is on par with full-precision models. We focus on the very
 low-precision case where weights and activations are both quantized to $\pm$1,
 and note that stochastically quantizing weights in just one layer can sharply
 reduce the impact of iterative attacks. We observe that non-scaled binary neural
 networks exhibit a similar effect to the original \emph{defensive distillation}
 procedure that led to \emph{gradient masking}, and a false notion of security.
 We address this by conducting both black-box and white-box experiments with
 binary models that do not artificially mask gradients.
We conduct adversarial attacks against binarized neural networks and show that we reduce the impact of the strongest attacks, while maintaining comparable accuracy in a black-box setting

We present a representation for describing transition models in complex uncertain domains using relational rules.   For any action, a rule selects a set of relevant objects and computes a distribution over properties of just those objects in the resulting state given their properties in the previous state.   An iterative greedy algorithm is used to construct a set of deictic references that determine which objects are relevant in any given state.    Feed-forward neural networks are used to learn the transition distribution on the relevant objects' properties.   This strategy is demonstrated to be both more versatile and more sample efficient than learning a monolithic transition model in a simulated domain in which a robot pushes stacks of objects on a cluttered table.
A new approach that learns a representation for describing transition models in complex uncertaindomains using relational rules. 

Unsupervised representation learning holds the promise of exploiting large amount of available unlabeled data to learn general representations. A promising technique for unsupervised learning is the framework of Variational Auto-encoders (VAEs). However, unsupervised representations learned by VAEs are significantly outperformed by those learned by supervising for recognition. Our hypothesis is that to learn useful representations for recognition the model needs to be encouraged to learn about repeating and consistent patterns in data. Drawing inspiration from the mid-level representation discovery work, we propose PatchVAE, that reasons about images at patch level. Our key contribution is a bottleneck formulation in a VAE framework that encourages mid-level style representations. Our experiments demonstrate that representations learned by our method perform much better on the recognition tasks compared to those learned by vanilla VAEs.

A patch-based bottleneck formulation in a VAE framework that learns unsupervised representations better suited for visual recognition.