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: The field of speech recognition is in the midst of a paradigm shift: end-to-end neural networks are challenging the dominance of hidden Markov models as a core technology. Using an attention mechanism in a recurrent encoder-decoder architecture solves the dynamic time alignment problem, allowing joint end-to-end training of the acoustic and language modeling components. In this paper we extend the end-to-end framework to encompass microphone array signal processing for noise suppression and speech enhancement within the acoustic encoding network. This allows the beamforming components to be optimized jointly within the recognition architecture to improve the end-to-end speech recognition objective. Experiments on the noisy speech benchmarks (CHiME-4 and AMI) show that our multichannel end-to-end system outperformed the attention-based baseline with input from a conventional adaptive beamformer.

SOLUTION: Multichannel End-to-end Speech Recognition 

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: We present an efficient method for training slackrescaled structural SVM. Although finding the most violating label in a margin-rescaled formulation is often easy since the target function decomposes with respect to the structure, this is not the case for a slack-rescaled formulation, and finding the most violated label might be very difficult. Our core contribution is an efficient method for finding the most-violatinglabel in a slack-rescaled formulation, given an oracle that returns the most-violating-label in a (slightly modified) margin-rescaled formulation. We show that our method enables accurate and scalable training for slack-rescaled SVMs, reducing runtime by an order of magnitude compared to previous approaches to slack-rescaled SVMs.

SOLUTION:
Fast and Scalable Structural SVM with Slack Rescaling