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.

We propose Automating Science Journalism (ASJ), the process of producing a press release from a scientific paper, as a novel task that can serve as a new benchmark for neural abstractive summarization. ASJ is a challenging task as it requires long source texts to be summarized to long target texts, while also paraphrasing complex scientific concepts to be understood by the general audience. For this purpose, we introduce a specialized dataset for ASJ that contains scientific papers and their press releases from Science Daily. While state-of-the-art sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models could easily generate convincing press releases for ASJ, these are generally nonfactual and deviate from the source. To address this issue, we improve seq2seq generation via transfer learning by co-training with new targets: (i) scientific abstracts of sources and (ii) partitioned press releases. We further design a measure for factuality that scores how pertinent to the scientific papers the press releases under our seq2seq models are. Our quantitative and qualitative evaluation shows sizable improvements over a strong baseline, suggesting that the proposed framework could improve seq2seq summarization beyond ASJ.
New: application of seq2seq modelling to automating sciene journalism; highly abstractive dataset; transfer learning tricks; automatic evaluation measure.

Robust estimation under Huber's $\epsilon$-contamination model has become an important topic in statistics and theoretical computer science. Rate-optimal procedures such as Tukey's median and other estimators based on statistical depth functions are impractical because of their computational intractability. In this paper, we establish an intriguing connection between f-GANs and various depth functions through the lens of f-Learning. Similar to the derivation of f-GAN, we show that these depth functions that lead to rate-optimal robust estimators can all be viewed as variational lower bounds of the total variation distance in the framework of f-Learning. This connection opens the door of computing robust estimators using tools developed for training GANs. In particular, we show that a JS-GAN that uses a neural network discriminator with at least one hidden layer is able to achieve the minimax rate of robust mean estimation under Huber's $\epsilon$-contamination model. Interestingly, the hidden layers of the neural net structure in the discriminator class are shown to be necessary for robust estimation.
GANs are shown to provide us a new effective robust mean estimate against agnostic contaminations with both statistical optimality and practical tractability.

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which  trades off noisy gradient updates for computational efficiency, is the de-facto optimization algorithm to solve large-scale machine learning problems. SGD can make rapid learning progress by performing updates using subsampled training data, but the noisy updates also lead to slow asymptotic convergence.    Several variance reduction algorithms, such as SVRG, introduce control variates to obtain a lower variance gradient estimate and faster convergence.   Despite their appealing asymptotic guarantees, SVRG-like algorithms have not been widely adopted in deep learning. The traditional asymptotic analysis in stochastic optimization provides limited insight into training deep learning models under a fixed number of epochs. In this paper, we present a non-asymptotic analysis of SVRG under a noisy least squares regression problem. Our primary focus is to compare the exact loss of SVRG to that of SGD at each iteration t. We show that the learning dynamics of our regression model closely matches with that of neural networks on MNIST and CIFAR-10 for both the underparameterized and the overparameterized models. Our analysis and experimental results suggest there is a trade-off between the computational cost and the convergence speed in underparametrized neural networks. SVRG outperforms SGD after a few epochs in this regime. However, SGD is shown to always outperform SVRG in the overparameterized regime.

Non-asymptotic analysis of SGD and SVRG, showing the strength of each algorithm in convergence speed and computational cost, in both under-parametrized and over-parametrized settings.