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.
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Question: In this paper we introduce a new speech recognition system, leveraging a simple letter-based ConvNet acoustic model. The acoustic model requires only audio transcription for training -- no alignment annotations, nor any forced alignment step is needed. At inference, our decoder takes only a word list and a language model, and is fed with letter scores from the acoustic model -- no phonetic word lexicon is needed. Key ingredients for the acoustic model are Gated Linear Units and high dropout. We show near state-of-the-art results in word error rate on the LibriSpeech corpus with MFSC features, both on the clean and other configurations.


Answer: A letter-based ConvNet acoustic model leads to a simple and competitive speech recognition pipeline.


Question: We study the role of intrinsic motivation as an exploration bias for reinforcement learning in sparse-reward synergistic tasks, which are tasks where multiple agents must work together to achieve a goal they could not individually. Our key idea is that a good guiding principle for intrinsic motivation in synergistic tasks is to take actions which affect the world in ways that would not be achieved if the agents were acting on their own. Thus, we propose to incentivize agents to take (joint) actions whose effects cannot be predicted via a composition of the predicted effect for each individual agent. We study two instantiations of this idea, one based on the true states encountered, and another based on a dynamics model trained concurrently with the policy. While the former is simpler, the latter has the benefit of being analytically differentiable with respect to the action taken. We validate our approach in robotic bimanual manipulation tasks with sparse rewards; we find that our approach yields more efficient learning than both 1) training with only the sparse reward and 2) using the typical surprise-based formulation of intrinsic motivation, which does not bias toward synergistic behavior. Videos are available on the project webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/iclr2020-synergistic.

Answer: We propose a formulation of intrinsic motivation that is suitable as an exploration bias in multi-agent sparse-reward synergistic tasks, by encouraging agents to affect the world in ways that would not be achieved if they were acting individually.


Question: Retinal prostheses for treating incurable blindness are designed to electrically stimulate surviving retinal neurons,  causing them to send artificial visual signals to the brain. However, electrical stimulation generally cannot precisely reproduce  normal patterns of neural activity in the retina. Therefore, an electrical stimulus must be selected that produces a neural response as close as possible to the desired response. This requires a technique for computing a distance between the desired response and the achievable response that is meaningful in terms of the visual signal being conveyed. Here we propose a method to learn such a metric on neural responses, directly from recorded light responses of a population of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) in the primate retina. The learned metric produces a measure of similarity of RGC population responses that accurately reflects the similarity of the visual input. Using data from electrical stimulation experiments, we demonstrate that this metric may improve the performance of a prosthesis.

Answer:
Using triplets to learn a metric for comparing neural responses and improve the performance of a prosthesis.