TASK DEFINITION: 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.
PROBLEM: Deep neural networks are complex non-linear models used as predictive analytics tool and have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on many classification tasks.   However, they have no inherent capability to recognize when their predictions might go wrong. There have been several efforts in the recent past to detect natural errors i.e.  misclassified inputs but these mechanisms pose additional energy requirements.   To address this issue, we present a novel post-hoc framework to detect natural errors in an energy efficient way.   We achieve this by appending relevant features based linear classifiers per class referred as Relevant features based Auxiliary Cells (RACs).    The proposed technique makes use of the consensus between RACs appended at few selected hidden layers to distinguish the correctly classified inputs from misclassified inputs. The combined confidence of RACs is utilized to determine if classification should terminate at an early stage. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique on various image classification datasets such as CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and Tiny-ImageNet. Our results show that for CIFAR100 dataset trained on VGG16 network, RACs can detect 46% of the misclassified examples along with 12% reduction in energy compared to the baseline network while 69% of the examples are correctly classified.


SOLUTION: Improve the robustness and energy efficiency of a deep neural network using the hidden representations.

PROBLEM: Conventional deep reinforcement learning typically determines an appropriate primitive action at each timestep, which requires enormous amount of time and effort for learning an effective policy, especially in large and complex environments. To deal with the issue fundamentally, we incorporate macro actions, defined as sequences of primitive actions, into the primitive action space to form an augmented action space. The problem lies in how to find an appropriate macro action to augment the primitive action space.   The agent using a proper augmented action space is able to jump to a farther state and thus speed up the exploration process as well as facilitate the learning procedure. In previous researches, macro actions are developed by mining the most frequently used action sequences or repeating previous actions. However, the most frequently used action sequences are extracted from a past policy, which may only reinforce the original behavior of that policy. On the other hand, repeating actions may limit the diversity of behaviors of the agent. Instead, we propose to construct macro actions by a genetic algorithm, which eliminates the dependency of the macro action derivation procedure from the past policies of the agent.   Our approach appends a macro action to the primitive action space once at a time and evaluates whether the augmented action space leads to promising performance or not.    We perform extensive experiments and show that the constructed macro actions are able to speed up the learning process for a variety of deep reinforcement learning methods. Our experimental results also demonstrate that the macro actions suggested by our approach are transferable among deep reinforcement learning methods and similar environments. We further provide a comprehensive set of ablation analysis to validate our methodology.

SOLUTION: We propose to construct macro actions by a genetic algorithm, which eliminates the dependency of the macro action derivation procedure from the past policies of the agent.

PROBLEM: Variance reduction methods which use a mixture of large and small batch gradients, such as SVRG (Johnson & Zhang, 2013) and SpiderBoost (Wang et al., 2018), require significantly more computational resources per update than SGD (Robbins & Monro, 1951). We reduce the computational cost per update of variance reduction methods by introducing a sparse gradient operator blending the top-K operator (Stich et al., 2018; Aji & Heafield, 2017) and the randomized coordinate descent operator. While the computational cost of computing the derivative of a model parameter is constant, we make the observation that the gains in variance reduction are proportional to the magnitude of the derivative. In this paper, we show that a sparse gradient based on the magnitude of past gradients reduces the computational cost of model updates without a significant loss in variance reduction. Theoretically, our algorithm is at least as good as the best available algorithm (e.g. SpiderBoost) under appropriate settings of parameters and can be much more efficient if our algorithm succeeds in capturing the sparsity of the gradients. Empirically, our algorithm consistently outperforms SpiderBoost using various models to solve various image classification tasks. We also provide empirical evidence to support the intuition behind our algorithm via a simple gradient entropy computation, which serves to quantify gradient sparsity at every iteration.

SOLUTION:
We use sparsity to improve the computational complexity of variance reduction methods.