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: Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are 
 variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with limitations in practice: MCMC methods can be computationally demanding; VI methods may have large bias. 
 In this work, we aim to improve upon MCMC and VI by a novel hybrid method based on the idea of reducing simulation bias of finite-length MCMC chains using gradient-based optimisation. The proposed method can generate low-biased samples by increasing the length of MCMC simulation and optimising the MCMC hyper-parameters, which offers attractive balance between approximation bias and computational efficiency. We show that our method produces promising results on popular benchmarks when compared to recent hybrid methods of MCMC and VI.

SOLUTION: In this work, we aim to improve upon MCMC and VI by a novel hybrid method based on the idea of reducing simulation bias of finite-length MCMC chains using gradient-based optimisation.

PROBLEM: As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes an integral part of our life, the development of explainable AI, embodied in the decision-making process of an AI or robotic agent, becomes imperative.   For a robotic teammate, the ability to generate explanations to explain its behavior is one of the key requirements of an explainable agency. Prior work on explanation generation focuses on supporting the reasoning behind the robot's behavior. These approaches, however, fail to consider the mental workload needed to understand the received explanation. In other words, the human teammate is expected to understand any explanation provided, often before the task execution, no matter how much information is presented in the explanation.
 In this work, we argue that an explanation, especially complex ones, should be made in an online fashion during the execution, which helps spread out the information to be explained and thus reducing the mental workload of humans. However, a challenge here is that the different parts of an explanation are dependent on each other, which must be taken into account when generating online explanations. To this end, a general formulation of online explanation generation is presented along with three different implementations satisfying different online properties. We base our explanation generation method on a model reconciliation setting introduced in our prior work. Our approaches are evaluated both with human subjects in a standard planning competition (IPC) domain, using NASA Task Load Index (TLX), as well as in simulation with ten different problems across two IPC domains.


SOLUTION: We introduce online explanation to consider the cognitive requirement of the human for understanding the generated explanation by the agent.

PROBLEM: While neural networks have achieved high accuracy on standard image classification benchmarks, their accuracy drops to nearly zero in the presence of small adversarial perturbations to test inputs. Defenses based on regularization and adversarial training have been proposed, but often followed by new, stronger attacks that defeat these defenses. Can we somehow end this arms race? In this work, we study this problem for neural networks with one hidden layer. We first propose a method based on a semidefinite relaxation that outputs a certificate that for a given network and test input, no attack can force the error to exceed a certain value. Second, as this certificate is differentiable, we jointly optimize it with the network parameters, providing an adaptive regularizer that encourages robustness against all attacks. On MNIST, our approach produces a network and a certificate that no that perturbs each pixel by at most $\epsilon = 0.1$ can cause more than $35\%$ test error.


SOLUTION:
We demonstrate a certifiable, trainable, and scalable method for defending against adversarial examples.