TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
PROBLEM: For most reinforcement learning approaches, the learning is performed by maximizing an accumulative reward that is expectedly and manually defined for specific tasks. However, in real world, rewards are emergent phenomena from the complex interactions between agents and environments. In this paper, we propose an implicit generic reward model for reinforcement learning. Unlike those rewards that are manually defined for specific tasks, such implicit reward is task independent. It only comes from the deviation from the agents’ previous experiences.

SOLUTION: Experience enrichment based task independent reward model

PROBLEM: Binary embedding of high-dimensional data requires long codes to preserve the discriminative power of the input space. Traditional binary coding methods often suffer from very high computation and storage costs in such a scenario. To address this problem, we propose Circulant Binary Embedding (CBE) which generates binary codes by projecting the data with a circulant matrix. The circulant structure enables the use of Fast Fourier Transformation to speed up the computation. Compared to methods that use unstructured matrices, the proposed method improves the time complexity from O(d2) to O(d log d), and the space complexity from O(d2) to O(d) where d is the input dimensionality. We also propose a novel time-frequency alternating optimization to learn data-dependent circulant projections, which alternatively minimizes the objective in original and Fourier domains. We show by extensive experiments that the proposed approach gives much better performance than the state-of-the-art approaches for fixed time, and provides much faster computation with no performance degradation for fixed number of bits.

SOLUTION: Circulant Binary Embedding

PROBLEM: Multimedia or spoken content presents more attractive information than plain text content, but the former is more difficult to display on a screen and be selected by a user. As a result, accessing large collections of the former is much more difficult and time-consuming than the latter for humans. It’s therefore highly attractive to develop machines which can automatically understand spoken content and summarize the key information for humans to browse over. In this endeavor, a new task of machine comprehension of spoken content was proposed recently. The initial goal was defined as the listening comprehension test of TOEFL, a challenging academic English examination for English learners whose native languages are not English. An Attention-based Multi-hop Recurrent Neural Network (AMRNN) architecture was also proposed for this task, which considered only the sequential relationship within the speech utterances. In this paper, we propose a new Hierarchical Attention Model (HAM), which constructs multi-hopped attention mechanism over tree-structured rather than sequential representations for the utterances. Improved comprehension performance robust with respect to ASR errors were obtained.

SOLUTION:
HIERARCHICAL ATTENTION MODEL FOR IMPROVED MACHINE COMPREHENSION OF SPOKEN CONTENT