TASK DEFINITION: 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.
PROBLEM: Temporal Difference Learning with function approximation is known to be unstable. Previous work like \citet{sutton2009fast} and \citet{sutton2009convergent} has presented alternative objectives that are stable to minimize. However, in practice, TD-learning with neural networks requires various tricks like using a target network that updates slowly \citep{mnih2015human}. In this work we propose a constraint on the TD update that minimizes change to the target values. This constraint can be applied to the gradients of any TD objective, and can be easily applied to nonlinear function approximation. We validate this update by applying our technique to deep Q-learning, and training without a target network. We also show that adding this constraint on Baird's counterexample keeps Q-learning from diverging.

SOLUTION: We show that adding a constraint to TD updates stabilizes learning and allows Deep Q-learning without a target network

PROBLEM: The available resolution in our visual world is extremely high, if not infinite. Existing CNNs can be applied in a fully convolutional way to images of arbitrary resolution, but as the size of the input increases, they can not capture contextual information. In addition, computational requirements scale linearly to the number of input pixels, and resources are allocated uniformly across the input, no matter how informative different image regions are. We attempt to address these problems by proposing a novel architecture that traverses an image pyramid in a top-down fashion, while it uses a hard attention mechanism to selectively process only the most informative image parts. We conduct experiments on MNIST and ImageNet datasets, and we show that our models can significantly outperform fully convolutional counterparts, when the resolution of the input is that big that the receptive field of the baselines can not adequately cover the objects of interest. Gains in performance come for less FLOPs, because of the selective processing that we follow. Furthermore, our attention mechanism makes our predictions more interpretable, and creates a trade-off between accuracy and complexity that can be tuned both during training and testing time.

SOLUTION: We propose a novel architecture that traverses an image pyramid in a top-down fashion, while it visits only the most informative regions along the way.

PROBLEM: We propose a new architecture for distributed image compression from a group of distributed data sources. The work is motivated by practical needs of data-driven codec design, low power consumption, robustness, and data privacy. The proposed architecture, which we refer to as Distributed Recurrent Autoencoder for Scalable Image Compression (DRASIC), is able to train distributed encoders and one joint decoder on correlated data sources. Its compression capability is much better than the method of training codecs separately. Meanwhile, for 10 distributed sources, our distributed system remarkably performs within 2 dB peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of that of a single codec trained with all data sources. We experiment distributed sources with different correlations and show how our methodology well matches the Slepian-Wolf Theorem in Distributed Source Coding (DSC). Our method is also shown to be robust to the lack of presence of encoded data from a number of distributed sources. Moreover, it is scalable in the sense that codes can be decoded simultaneously at more than one compression quality level. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first data-driven DSC framework for general distributed code design with deep learning.

SOLUTION:
We introduce a data-driven Distributed Source Coding framework based on Distributed Recurrent Autoencoder for Scalable Image Compression (DRASIC).