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: Voice Conversion (VC) is a task of converting perceived speaker identity from a source speaker to a particular target speaker. Earlier approaches in the literature primarily find a mapping between the given source-target speaker-pairs. Developing mapping techniques for many-to-many VC using non-parallel data, including zero-shot learning remains less explored areas in VC. Most of the many-to-many VC architectures require training data from all the target speakers for whom we want to convert the voices. In this paper, we propose a novel style transfer architecture, which can also be extended to generate voices even for target speakers whose data were not used in the training (i.e., case of zero-shot learning). In particular, propose Adaptive Generative Adversarial Network (AdaGAN), new architectural training procedure help in learning normalized speaker-independent latent representation, which will be used to generate speech with different speaking styles in the context of VC. We compare our results with the state-of-the-art StarGAN-VC architecture. In particular, the AdaGAN achieves 31.73%, and 10.37% relative improvement compared to the StarGAN in MOS tests for speech quality and speaker similarity, respectively. The key strength of the proposed architectures is that it yields these results with less computational complexity. AdaGAN is 88.6% less complex than StarGAN-VC in terms of FLoating Operation Per Second (FLOPS), and 85.46% less complex in terms of trainable parameters.  

SOLUTION: Novel adaptive instance normalization based GAN framework for non parallel many-to-many and zero-shot VC. 

PROBLEM: Neural networks with low-precision weights and activations offer compelling
 efficiency advantages over their full-precision equivalents. The two most
 frequently discussed benefits of quantization are reduced memory consumption,
 and a faster forward pass when implemented with efficient bitwise
 operations. We propose a third benefit of very low-precision neural networks:
 improved robustness against some adversarial attacks, and in the worst case,
 performance that is on par with full-precision models. We focus on the very
 low-precision case where weights and activations are both quantized to $\pm$1,
 and note that stochastically quantizing weights in just one layer can sharply
 reduce the impact of iterative attacks. We observe that non-scaled binary neural
 networks exhibit a similar effect to the original \emph{defensive distillation}
 procedure that led to \emph{gradient masking}, and a false notion of security.
 We address this by conducting both black-box and white-box experiments with
 binary models that do not artificially mask gradients.

SOLUTION: We conduct adversarial attacks against binarized neural networks and show that we reduce the impact of the strongest attacks, while maintaining comparable accuracy in a black-box setting

PROBLEM: We investigate methods to efficiently learn diverse strategies in reinforcement learning for a generative structured prediction problem: query reformulation. In the proposed framework an agent consists of multiple specialized sub-agents and a meta-agent that learns to aggregate the answers from sub-agents to produce a final answer. Sub-agents are trained on disjoint partitions of the training data, while the meta-agent is trained on the full training set. Our method makes learning faster, because it is highly parallelizable, and has better generalization performance than strong baselines, such as
 an ensemble of agents trained on the full data. We evaluate on the tasks of document retrieval and question answering. The
 improved performance seems due to the increased diversity of reformulation strategies. This suggests that multi-agent, hierarchical approaches might play an important role in structured prediction tasks of this kind. However, we also find that it is not obvious how to characterize diversity in this context, and a first attempt based on clustering did not produce good results. Furthermore, reinforcement learning for the reformulation task is hard in high-performance regimes. At best, it only marginally improves over the state of the art, which highlights the complexity of training models in this framework for end-to-end language understanding problems.

SOLUTION:
We use reinforcement learning for query reformulation on two tasks and surprisingly find that when training multiple agents diversity of the reformulations is more important than specialisation.