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: 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.

Output: 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.


Input: Consider Input: Recent work has shown that contextualized word representations derived from neural machine translation (NMT) are a viable alternative to such from simple word predictions tasks. This is because the internal understanding that needs to be built in order to be able to translate from one language to another is much more comprehensive. Unfortunately, computational and memory limitations as of present prevent NMT models from using large word vocabularies, and thus alternatives such as subword units (BPE and morphological segmentations) and characters have been used. Here we study the impact of using different kinds of units on the quality of the resulting representations when used to model syntax, semantics, and morphology.   We found that while representations derived from subwords are slightly better for modeling syntax, character-based representations are superior for modeling morphology and are also more robust to noisy input.

Output: We study the impact of using different kinds of subword units on the quality of the resulting representations when used to model syntax, semantics, and morphology.


Input: Consider Input: Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss functions and training nonconvex deep neural networks. The theory assumes that one can easily compute an unbiased gradient estimator, which is usually the case due to the sample average nature of empirical risk minimization. There exist, however, many scenarios (e.g., graphs) where an unbiased estimator may be as expensive to compute as the full gradient because training examples are interconnected. Recently, Chen et al. (2018) proposed using a consistent gradient estimator as an economic alternative. Encouraged by empirical success, we show, in a general setting, that consistent estimators result in the same convergence behavior as do unbiased ones. Our analysis covers strongly convex, convex, and nonconvex objectives. We verify the results with illustrative experiments on synthetic and real-world data. This work opens several new research directions, including the development of more efficient SGD updates with consistent estimators and the design of efficient training algorithms for large-scale graphs.



Output: Convergence theory for biased (but consistent) gradient estimators in stochastic optimization and application to graph convolutional networks