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:
Loss functions play a crucial role in deep metric learning thus a variety of them have been proposed. Some supervise the learning process by pairwise or tripletwise similarity constraints while others take the advantage of structured similarity information among multiple data points. In this work, we approach deep metric learning from a novel perspective. We propose instance cross entropy (ICE) which measures the difference between an estimated instance-level matching distribution and its ground-truth one. ICE has three main appealing properties. Firstly, similar to categorical cross entropy (CCE), ICE has clear probabilistic interpretation and exploits structured semantic similarity information for learning supervision. Secondly, ICE is scalable to infinite training data as it learns on mini-batches iteratively and is independent of the training set size. Thirdly, motivated by our relative weight analysis, seamless sample reweighting is incorporated. It rescales samples’ gradients to control the differentiation degree over training examples instead of truncating them by sample mining. In addition to its simplicity and intuitiveness, extensive experiments on three real-world benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of ICE.
answer:
We propose instance cross entropy (ICE) which measures the difference between an estimated instance-level matching distribution and its ground-truth one. 


question:
Deterministic models are approximations of reality that are often easier to build and interpret than stochastic alternatives.  
 Unfortunately, as nature is capricious, observational data can never be fully explained by deterministic models in practice.  
 Observation and process noise need to be added to adapt deterministic models to behave stochastically, such that they are capable of explaining and extrapolating from noisy data.
 Adding process noise to deterministic simulators can induce a failure in the simulator resulting in no return value for certain inputs -- a property we describe as ``brittle.''
 We investigate and address the wasted computation that arises from these failures, and the effect of such failures on downstream inference tasks.
 We show that performing inference in this space can be viewed as rejection sampling, and train a conditional normalizing flow as a proposal over noise values such that there is a low probability that the simulator crashes, increasing computational efficiency and inference fidelity for a fixed sample budget when used as the proposal in an approximate inference algorithm.
answer:
We learn a conditional autoregressive flow to propose perturbations that don't induce simulator failure, improving inference performance.


question:
We address the efficiency issues caused by the straggler effect in the recently emerged federated learning, which collaboratively trains a model on decentralized non-i.i.d. (non-independent and identically distributed) data across massive worker devices without exchanging training data in the unreliable and heterogeneous networks. We propose a novel two-stage analysis on the error bounds of general federated learning, which provides practical insights into optimization. As a result, we propose a novel easy-to-implement federated learning algorithm that uses asynchronous settings and strategies to control discrepancies between the global model and delayed models and adjust the number of local epochs with the estimation of staleness to accelerate convergence and resist performance deterioration caused by stragglers. Experiment results show that our algorithm converges fast and robust on the existence of massive stragglers.
answer:

We propose an efficient and robust asynchronous federated learning algorithm on the existence of stragglers