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: Recent DNN pruning algorithms have succeeded in reducing the number of parameters in fully connected layers often with little or no drop in classification accuracy. However most of the existing pruning schemes either have to be applied during training or require a costly retraining procedure after pruning to regain classification accuracy. In this paper we propose a cheap pruning algorithm based on difference of convex (DC) optimisation. We also provide theoretical analysis for the growth in the Generalisation Error (GE) of the new pruned network. Our method can be used with any convex regulariser and allows for a controlled degradation in classification accuracy while being orders of magnitude faster than competing approaches. Experiments on common feedforward neural networks show that for sparsity levels above 90% our method achieves 10% higher classification accuracy compared to Hard Thresholding.

Answer: A fast pruning algorithm for fully connected DNN layers with theoretical analysis of degradation in Generalisation Error.


Question: Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach for approximate Bayesian inference that is particularly promising for highly parameterized models such as deep neural networks.   A key challenge of variational inference is to approximate the posterior over model parameters with a distribution that is simpler and tractable yet sufficiently expressive. In this work, we propose a method for training highly flexible variational distributions by starting with a coarse approximation and iteratively refining it. Each refinement step makes cheap, local adjustments and only requires optimization of simple variational families. We demonstrate theoretically that our method always improves a bound on the approximation (the Evidence Lower BOund) and observe this empirically across a variety of benchmark tasks.   In experiments, our method consistently outperforms recent variational inference methods for deep learning in terms of log-likelihood and the ELBO.   We see that the gains are further amplified on larger scale models, significantly outperforming standard VI and deep ensembles on residual networks on CIFAR10.

Answer: The paper proposes an algorithm to increase the flexibility of the variational posterior in Bayesian neural networks through iterative optimization.


Question: Most classification and segmentation datasets assume a closed-world scenario in which predictions are expressed as distribution over a predetermined set of visual classes. However, such assumption implies unavoidable and often unnoticeable failures in presence of out-of-distribution (OOD) input. These failures are bound to happen in most real-life applications since current visual ontologies are far from being comprehensive. We propose to address this issue by discriminative detection 
 of OOD pixels in input data. Different from recent approaches, we avoid to bring any decisions by only observing the training dataset of the primary model trained to solve the desired computer vision task. Instead, we train a dedicated OOD model
 which discriminates the primary training set from a much larger "background" dataset which approximates the variety of the visual world. We perform our experiments on high resolution natural images in a dense prediction setup. We use several road driving datasets as our training distribution, while we approximate the background distribution with the ILSVRC dataset. We evaluate our approach on WildDash test, which is currently the only public test dataset with out-of-distribution images.
 The obtained results show that the proposed approach succeeds to identify out-of-distribution pixels while outperforming previous work by a wide margin.

Answer:
We present a novel approach for detecting out-of-distribution pixels in semantic segmentation.