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.

Input: Consider Input: Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach for approximate Bayesian inference that is particularly promising for highly parameterized models such as deep neural networks.   A key challenge of variational inference is to approximate the posterior over model parameters with a distribution that is simpler and tractable yet sufficiently expressive. In this work, we propose a method for training highly flexible variational distributions by starting with a coarse approximation and iteratively refining it. Each refinement step makes cheap, local adjustments and only requires optimization of simple variational families. We demonstrate theoretically that our method always improves a bound on the approximation (the Evidence Lower BOund) and observe this empirically across a variety of benchmark tasks.   In experiments, our method consistently outperforms recent variational inference methods for deep learning in terms of log-likelihood and the ELBO.   We see that the gains are further amplified on larger scale models, significantly outperforming standard VI and deep ensembles on residual networks on CIFAR10.

Output: The paper proposes an algorithm to increase the flexibility of the variational posterior in Bayesian neural networks through iterative optimization.


Input: Consider Input: 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.

Output: We learn a conditional autoregressive flow to propose perturbations that don't induce simulator failure, improving inference performance.


Input: Consider Input: We propose the Neuro-Symbolic Concept Learner (NS-CL), a model that learns visual concepts, words, and semantic parsing of sentences without explicit supervision on any of them; instead, our model learns by simply looking at images and reading paired questions and answers. Our model builds an object-based scene representation and translates sentences into executable, symbolic programs. To bridge the learning of two modules, we use a neuro-symbolic reasoning module that executes these programs on the latent scene representation. Analogical to human concept learning, the perception module learns visual concepts based on the language description of the object being referred to. Meanwhile, the learned visual concepts facilitate learning new words and parsing new sentences. We use curriculum learning to guide the searching over the large compositional space of images and language. Extensive experiments demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our model on learning visual concepts, word representations, and semantic parsing of sentences. Further, our method allows easy generalization to new object attributes, compositions, language concepts, scenes and questions, and even new program domains. It also empowers applications including visual question answering and bidirectional image-text retrieval.


Output: We propose the Neuro-Symbolic Concept Learner (NS-CL), a model that learns visual concepts, words, and semantic parsing of sentences without explicit supervision on any of them.