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: Problem solving in Answer Set Programming consists of two steps, a first grounding phase, systematically replacing all variables by terms, and a second solving phase computing the stable models of the obtained ground program. An intricate part of both phases is the treatment of aggregates, which are popular language constructs that allow for expressing properties over sets. In this paper, we elaborate upon the treatment of aggregates during grounding in gringo series 4. Consequently, our approach is applicable to grounding based on semi-naive database evaluation techniques. In particular, we provide a series of algorithms detailing the treatment of recursive aggregates and illustrate this by a running example.

SOLUTION: Grounding Recursive Aggregates: Preliminary Report

PROBLEM: With a weighting scheme proportional to t, a traditional stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm achieves a high probability convergence rate of O(κ/T ) for strongly convex functions, instead of O(κ ln(T )/T ). We also prove that an accelerated SGD algorithm also achieves a rate of O(κ/T ).

SOLUTION:
Stochastic gradient descent algorithms for strongly convex functions at O(1/T ) convergence rates