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: Synthesizing user-intended programs from a small number of input-output exam-
 ples is a challenging problem with several important applications like spreadsheet
 manipulation, data wrangling and code refactoring. Existing synthesis systems
 either completely rely on deductive logic techniques that are extensively hand-
 engineered or on purely statistical models that need massive amounts of data, and in
 general fail to provide real-time synthesis on challenging benchmarks. In this work,
 we propose Neural Guided Deductive Search (NGDS), a hybrid synthesis technique
 that combines the best of both symbolic logic techniques and statistical models.
 Thus, it produces programs that satisfy the provided specifications by construction
 and generalize well on unseen examples, similar to data-driven systems. Our
 technique effectively utilizes the deductive search framework to reduce the learning
 problem of the neural component to a simple supervised learning setup. Further,
 this allows us to both train on sparingly available real-world data and still leverage
 powerful recurrent neural network encoders. We demonstrate the effectiveness
 of our method by evaluating on real-world customer scenarios by synthesizing
 accurate programs with up to 12× speed-up compared to state-of-the-art systems.

SOLUTION: We integrate symbolic (deductive) and statistical (neural-based) methods to enable real-time program synthesis with almost perfect generalization from 1 input-output example.

PROBLEM: Deep generative models can emulate the perceptual properties of complex image datasets, providing a latent representation of the data. However, manipulating such representation to perform meaningful and controllable transformations in the data space remains challenging without some form of supervision. While previous work has focused on exploiting statistical independence to \textit{disentangle} latent factors, we argue that such requirement can be advantageously relaxed and propose instead a non-statistical framework that relies on identifying a modular organization of the network, based on counterfactual manipulations. Our experiments support that modularity between groups of channels is achieved to a certain degree on a variety of generative models. This allowed the design of targeted interventions on complex image datasets, opening the way to applications such as computationally efficient style transfer and the automated assessment of robustness to contextual changes in pattern recognition systems.

SOLUTION: We develop a framework to find modular internal representations in generative models and manipulate then to generate counterfactual examples.

PROBLEM: The vertebrate visual system is hierarchically organized to process visual information in successive stages. Neural representations vary drastically across the first stages of visual processing: at the output of the retina, ganglion cell receptive fields (RFs) exhibit a clear antagonistic center-surround structure, whereas in the primary visual cortex (V1), typical RFs are sharply tuned to a precise orientation. There is currently no unified theory explaining these differences in representations across layers. Here, using a deep convolutional neural network trained on image recognition as a model of the visual system, we show that such differences in representation can emerge as a direct consequence of different neural resource constraints on the retinal and cortical networks, and for the first time we find a single model from which both geometries spontaneously emerge at the appropriate stages of visual processing. The key constraint is a reduced number of neurons at the retinal output, consistent with the anatomy of the optic nerve as a stringent bottleneck. Second, we find that, for simple downstream cortical networks, visual representations at the retinal output emerge as nonlinear and lossy feature detectors, whereas they emerge as linear and faithful encoders of the visual scene for more complex cortical networks. This result predicts that the retinas of small vertebrates (e.g. salamander, frog) should perform sophisticated nonlinear computations, extracting features directly relevant to behavior, whereas retinas of large animals such as primates should mostly encode the visual scene linearly and respond to a much broader range of stimuli. These predictions could reconcile the two seemingly incompatible views of the retina as either performing feature extraction or efficient coding of natural scenes, by suggesting that all vertebrates lie on a spectrum between these two objectives, depending on the degree of neural resources allocated to their visual system.

SOLUTION:
We reproduced neural representations found in biological visual systems by simulating their neural resource constraints in a deep convolutional model.