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:   The goal of compressed sensing is to learn a structured signal $x$
  from a limited number of noisy linear measurements $y \approx Ax$.  In
  traditional compressed sensing, ``structure'' is represented by
  sparsity in some known basis.   Inspired by the success of deep
  learning in modeling images, recent work starting with~\cite{BDJP17}
  has instead considered structure to come from a generative model
  $G: \R^k \to \R^n$.  We present two results establishing the
  difficulty of this latter task, showing that existing bounds are
  tight.

   First, we provide a lower bound matching the~\cite{BDJP17} upper
  bound for compressed sensing from $L$-Lipschitz generative models
  $G$.  In particular, there exists such a function that requires
  roughly $\Omega(k \log L)$ linear measurements for sparse recovery
  to be possible.   This holds even for the more relaxed goal of
  \emph{nonuniform} recovery.

   Second, we show that generative models generalize sparsity as a
  representation of structure.   In particular, we construct a
  ReLU-based neural network $G: \R^{2k} \to \R^n$ with $O(1)$ layers
  and $O(kn)$ activations per layer, such that the range of $G$
  contains all $k$-sparse vectors.


SOLUTION: Lower bound for compressed sensing w/ generative models that matches known upper bounds

PROBLEM: The sign stochastic gradient descent method (signSGD) utilizes only the sign of the stochastic gradient in its updates. Since signSGD carries out one-bit quantization of the gradients, it is extremely practical for distributed optimization where gradients need to be aggregated from different processors. For the first time, we establish convergence rates for signSGD on general non-convex functions under transparent conditions. We show that the rate of signSGD to reach first-order critical points matches that of SGD in terms of number of stochastic gradient calls, up to roughly a linear factor in the dimension. We carry out simple experiments to explore the behaviour of sign gradient descent (without the stochasticity) close to saddle points and show that it often helps completely avoid them without using either stochasticity or curvature information.

SOLUTION: We prove a non-convex convergence rate for the sign stochastic gradient method. The algorithm has links to algorithms like Adam and Rprop, as well as gradient quantisation schemes used in distributed machine learning.

PROBLEM: We address the following question: How redundant is the parameterisation of ReLU networks? Specifically, we consider transformations of the weight space which leave the function implemented by the network intact. Two such transformations are known for feed-forward architectures: permutation of neurons within a layer, and positive scaling of all incoming weights of a neuron coupled with inverse scaling of its outgoing weights. In this work, we show for architectures with non-increasing widths that permutation and scaling are in fact the only function-preserving weight transformations. For any eligible architecture we give an explicit construction of a neural network such that any other network that implements the same function can be obtained from the original one by the application of permutations and rescaling. The proof relies on a geometric understanding of boundaries between linear regions of ReLU networks, and we hope the developed mathematical tools are of independent interest.


SOLUTION:
We prove that there exist ReLU networks whose parameters are almost uniquely determined by the function they implement.