TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
PROBLEM: We introduce a novel training principle for generative probabilistic models that is an alternative to maximum likelihood. The proposed Generative Stochastic Networks (GSN) framework generalizes Denoising Auto-Encoders (DAE) and is based on learning the transition operator of a Markov chain whose stationary distribution estimates the data distribution. The transition distribution is a conditional distribution that generally involves a small move, so it has fewer dominant modes and is unimodal in the limit of small moves. This simplifies the learning problem, making it less like density estimation and more akin to supervised function approximation, with gradients that can be obtained by backprop. The theorems provided here provide a probabilistic interpretation for denoising autoencoders and generalize them; seen in the context of this framework, auto-encoders that learn with injected noise are a special case of GSNs and can be interpreted as generative models. The theorems also provide an interesting justification for dependency networks and generalized pseudolikelihood and define an appropriate joint distribution and sampling mechanism, even when the conditionals are not consistent. GSNs can be used with missing inputs and can be used to sample subsets of variables given the rest. Experiments validating these theoretical results are conducted on both synthetic datasets and image datasets. The experiments employ a particular architecture that mimics the Deep Boltzmann Machine Gibbs sampler but that allows training to proceed with backprop through a recurrent neural network with noise injected inside and without the need for layerwise pretraining.

SOLUTION: GSNs: Generative Stochastic Networks

PROBLEM: Many prediction domains, such as ad placement, recommendation, trajectory prediction, and document summarization, require predicting a set or list of options. Such lists are often evaluated using submodular reward functions that measure both quality and diversity. We propose a simple, efficient, and provably near-optimal approach to optimizing such prediction problems based on noregret learning. Our method leverages a surprising result from online submodular optimization: a single no-regret online learner can compete with an optimal sequence of predictions. Compared to previous work, which either learn a sequence of classifiers or rely on stronger assumptions such as realizability, we ensure both data-efficiency as well as performance guarantees in the fully agnostic setting. Experiments validate the efficiency and applicability of the approach on a wide range of problems including manipulator trajectory optimization, news recommendation and document summarization.

SOLUTION: Learning Policies for Contextual Submodular Prediction

PROBLEM: Boolean matrix factorisation (BooMF) infers interpretable decompositions of a binary data matrix into a pair of low-rank, binary matrices: One containing meaningful patterns, the other quantifying how the observations can be expressed as a combination of these patterns. We introduce the OrMachine, a probabilistic generative model for BooMF and derive a Metropolised Gibbs sampler that facilitates very efficient parallel posterior inference. Our method outperforms all currently existing approaches for Boolean Matrix factorization and completion, as we show on simulated and real world data. This is the first method to provide full posterior inference for BooMF which is relevant in applications, e.g. for controlling false positive rates in collaborative filtering, and crucially it improves the interpretability of the inferred patterns. The proposed algorithm scales to large datasets as we demonstrate by analysing single cell gene expression data in 1.3 million mouse brain cells across 11,000 genes on commodity hardware.

SOLUTION:
Bayesian Boolean Matrix Factorisation