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.
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Question: This paper develops variational continual learning (VCL), a simple but general framework for continual learning that fuses online variational inference (VI) and recent advances in Monte Carlo VI for neural networks. The framework can successfully train both deep discriminative models and deep generative models in complex continual learning settings where existing tasks evolve over time and entirely new tasks emerge. Experimental results show that VCL outperforms state-of-the-art continual learning methods on a variety of tasks, avoiding catastrophic forgetting in a fully automatic way.

Answer: This paper develops a principled method for continual learning in deep models.


Question: Understanding the groundbreaking performance of Deep Neural Networks is one
 of the greatest challenges to the scientific community today. In this work, we
 introduce an information theoretic viewpoint on the behavior of deep networks
 optimization processes and their generalization abilities. By studying the Information
 Plane, the plane of the mutual information between the input variable and
 the desired label, for each hidden layer. Specifically, we show that the training of
 the network is characterized by a rapid increase in the mutual information (MI)
 between the layers and the target label, followed by a longer decrease in the MI
 between the layers and the input variable. Further, we explicitly show that these
 two fundamental information-theoretic quantities correspond to the generalization
 error of the network, as a result of introducing a new generalization bound that is
 exponential in the representation compression. The analysis focuses on typical
 patterns of large-scale problems. For this purpose, we introduce a novel analytic
 bound on the mutual information between consecutive layers in the network.
 An important consequence of our analysis is a super-linear boost in training time
 with the number of non-degenerate hidden layers, demonstrating the computational
 benefit of the hidden layers.

Answer: Introduce an information theoretic viewpoint on the behavior of deep networks optimization processes and their generalization abilities


Question: We propose a novel attention mechanism to enhance Convolutional Neural Networks for fine-grained recognition. The proposed mechanism reuses CNN feature activations to find the most informative parts of the image at different depths with the help of gating mechanisms and without part annotations. Thus, it can be used to augment any layer of a CNN to extract low- and high-level local information to be more discriminative. 

 Differently, from other approaches, the mechanism we propose just needs a single pass through the input and it can be trained end-to-end through SGD. As a consequence, the proposed mechanism is modular, architecture-independent, easy to implement, and faster than iterative approaches.

 Experiments show that, when augmented with our approach, Wide Residual Networks systematically achieve superior performance on each of five different fine-grained recognition datasets: the Adience age and gender recognition benchmark, Caltech-UCSD Birds-200-2011, Stanford Dogs, Stanford Cars, and UEC Food-100, obtaining competitive and state-of-the-art scores.

Answer:
We enhance CNNs with a novel attention mechanism for fine-grained recognition. Superior performance is obtained on 5 datasets.