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.

[Q]: We introduce an attention mechanism to improve feature extraction for deep active learning (AL) in the semi-supervised setting. The proposed attention mechanism is based on recent methods to visually explain predictions made by DNNs. We apply the proposed explanation-based attention to MNIST and SVHN classification. The conducted experiments show accuracy improvements for the original and class-imbalanced datasets with the same number of training examples and faster long-tail convergence compared to uncertainty-based methods.
[A]: We introduce an attention mechanism to improve feature extraction for deep active learning (AL) in the semi-supervised setting.


[Q]: We consider a simple and overarching representation for permutation-invariant functions of sequences (or set functions). Our approach, which we call Janossy pooling, expresses a permutation-invariant function as the average of a permutation-sensitive function applied to all reorderings of the input sequence. This allows us to leverage the rich and mature literature on permutation-sensitive functions to construct novel and flexible permutation-invariant functions. If carried out naively, Janossy pooling can be computationally prohibitive. To allow computational tractability, we consider three kinds of approximations: canonical orderings of sequences, functions with k-order interactions, and stochastic optimization algorithms with random permutations. Our framework unifies a variety of existing work in the literature, and suggests possible modeling and algorithmic extensions. We explore a few in our experiments, which demonstrate improved performance over current state-of-the-art methods.
[A]: We propose Janossy pooling, a method for learning deep permutation invariant functions designed to exploit relationships within the input sequence and tractable inference strategies such as a stochastic optimization procedure we call piSGD


[Q]: Sorting input objects is an important step in many machine learning pipelines. However, the sorting operator is non-differentiable with respect to its inputs, which prohibits end-to-end gradient-based optimization. In this work, we propose NeuralSort, a general-purpose continuous relaxation of the output of the sorting operator from permutation matrices to the set of unimodal row-stochastic matrices, where every row sums to one and has a distinct argmax. This relaxation permits straight-through optimization of any computational graph involve a sorting operation. Further, we use this relaxation to enable gradient-based stochastic optimization over the combinatorially large space of permutations by deriving a reparameterized gradient estimator for the Plackett-Luce family of distributions over permutations. We demonstrate the usefulness of our framework on three tasks that require learning semantic orderings of high-dimensional objects, including a fully differentiable, parameterized extension of the k-nearest neighbors algorithm
[A]:
We provide a continuous relaxation to the sorting operator, enabling end-to-end, gradient-based stochastic optimization.