instruction:
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.
question:
Many processes can be concisely represented as a sequence of events leading from a starting state to an end state. Given raw ingredients, and a finished cake, an experienced chef can surmise the recipe. Building upon this intuition,  we propose a new class of visual generative models: goal-conditioned predictors (GCP). Prior work on video generation largely focuses on prediction models that only observe frames from the beginning of the video. GCP instead treats videos as start-goal transformations, making video generation easier by conditioning on the more informative context provided by the first and final frames.  Not only do existing forward prediction approaches synthesize better and longer videos when modified to become goal-conditioned,  but GCP models can also utilize structures that are not linear in time, to accomplish hierarchical prediction . To this end, we study both auto-regressive GCP models and novel tree-structured GCP models that generate frames recursively, splitting the video iteratively into finer and finer segments delineated by subgoals . In experiments across simulated and real datasets, our GCP methods generate high-quality sequences over long horizons .  Tree-structured GCPs are also substantially easier to parallelize than auto-regressive GCPs, making training  and  inference  very  efficient, and allowing the model to train on sequences that are thousands of frames in length.Finally, we demonstrate the utility of GCP approaches for imitation learning in the setting without access to expert actions . Videos are on the supplementary website: https://sites.google.com/view/video-gcp
answer:
We propose a new class of visual generative models: goal-conditioned predictors. We show experimentally that conditioning on the goal allows to reduce uncertainty and produce predictions over much longer horizons.


question:
Asynchronous distributed gradient descent algorithms for training of deep neural
 networks are usually considered as inefficient, mainly because of the Gradient delay
 problem. In this paper, we propose a novel asynchronous distributed algorithm
 that tackles this limitation by well-thought-out averaging of model updates, computed
 by workers. The algorithm allows computing gradients along the process
 of gradient merge, thus, reducing or even completely eliminating worker idle time
 due to communication overhead, which is a pitfall of existing asynchronous methods.
 We provide theoretical analysis of the proposed asynchronous algorithm,
 and show its regret bounds. According to our analysis, the crucial parameter for
 keeping high convergence rate is the maximal discrepancy between local parameter
 vectors of any pair of workers. As long as it is kept relatively small, the
 convergence rate of the algorithm is shown to be the same as the one of a sequential
 online learning. Furthermore, in our algorithm, this discrepancy is bounded
 by an expression that involves the staleness parameter of the algorithm, and is
 independent on the number of workers. This is the main differentiator between
 our approach and other solutions, such as Elastic Asynchronous SGD or Downpour
 SGD, in which that maximal discrepancy is bounded by an expression that
 depends on the number of workers, due to gradient delay problem. To demonstrate
 effectiveness of our approach, we conduct a series of experiments on image
 classification task on a cluster with 4 machines, equipped with a commodity communication
 switch and with a single GPU card per machine. Our experiments
 show a linear scaling on 4-machine cluster without sacrificing the test accuracy,
 while eliminating almost completely worker idle time. Since our method allows
 using commodity communication switch, it paves a way for large scale distributed
 training performed on commodity clusters.
answer:
A method for an efficient asynchronous distributed training of deep learning models along with theoretical regret bounds.


question:
We propose a novel method for incorporating conditional information into a generative adversarial network (GAN) for structured prediction tasks. This method is based on fusing features from the generated and conditional information in feature space and allows the discriminator to better capture higher-order statistics from the data. This method also increases the strength of the signals passed through the network where the real or generated data and the conditional data agree. The proposed method is conceptually simpler than the joint convolutional neural network - conditional Markov random field (CNN-CRF) models and enforces higher-order consistency without being limited to a very specific class of high-order potentials. Experimental results demonstrate that this method leads to improvement on a variety of different structured prediction tasks including image synthesis, semantic segmentation, and depth estimation.
answer:

We propose a novel way to incorporate conditional image information into the discriminator of GANs using feature fusion that can be used for structured prediction tasks.