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.

[Q]: Convolutional networks are not aware of an object's geometric variations, which leads to inefficient utilization of model and data capacity. To overcome this issue, recent works on deformation modeling seek to spatially reconfigure the data towards a common arrangement such that semantic recognition suffers less from deformation. This is typically done by augmenting static operators with learned free-form sampling grids in the image space, dynamically tuned to the data and task for adapting the receptive field. Yet adapting the receptive field does not quite reach the actual goal -- what really matters to the network is the *effective* receptive field (ERF), which reflects how much each pixel contributes. It is thus natural to design other approaches to adapt the ERF directly during runtime. In this work, we instantiate one possible solution as Deformable Kernels (DKs), a family of novel and generic convolutional operators for handling object deformations by directly adapting the ERF while leaving the receptive field untouched. At the heart of our method is the ability to resample the original kernel space towards recovering the deformation of objects. This approach is justified with theoretical insights that the ERF is strictly determined by data sampling locations and kernel values. We implement DKs as generic drop-in replacements of rigid kernels and conduct a series of empirical studies whose results conform with our theories. Over several tasks and standard base models, our approach compares favorably against prior works that adapt during runtime. In addition, further experiments suggest a working mechanism orthogonal and complementary to previous works.
[A]: Don't deform your convolutions -- deform your kernels.


[Q]: The novel \emph{Unbiased Online Recurrent Optimization} (UORO) algorithm allows for online learning of general recurrent computational graphs such as recurrent network models. It works in a streaming fashion and avoids backtracking through past activations and inputs. UORO is computationally as costly as \emph{Truncated Backpropagation Through Time} (truncated BPTT), a widespread algorithm for online learning of recurrent networks \cite{jaeger2002tutorial}.  UORO is a modification of \emph{NoBackTrack} \cite{DBLP:journals/corr/OllivierC15} that bypasses the need for model sparsity and makes implementation easy in current deep learning frameworks, even for complex models.   Like NoBackTrack, UORO provides unbiased gradient estimates; unbiasedness is the core hypothesis in stochastic gradient descent theory, without which convergence to a local optimum is not guaranteed. On the contrary, truncated BPTT does not provide this property, leading to possible divergence.   On synthetic tasks where truncated BPTT is shown to diverge, UORO converges. For instance, when a parameter has a positive short-term but negative long-term influence, truncated BPTT diverges unless the truncation span is very significantly longer than the intrinsic temporal range of the interactions, while UORO performs well thanks to the unbiasedness of its gradients.

[A]: Introduces an online, unbiased and easily implementable gradient estimate for recurrent models.


[Q]: Although variational autoencoders (VAEs) represent a widely influential deep generative model, many aspects of the underlying energy function remain poorly understood.  In particular, it is commonly believed that Gaussian encoder/decoder assumptions reduce the effectiveness of VAEs in generating realistic samples .  In this regard, we rigorously analyze the VAE objective, differentiating situations where this belief is and is not actually true .  We then leverage the corresponding insights to develop a simple VAE enhancement that requires no additional hyperparameters or sensitive tuning .  Quantitatively, this proposal produces crisp samples and stable FID scores that are actually competitive with a variety of GAN models, all while retaining desirable attributes of the original VAE architecture . The code for our model is available at \url{https://github.com/daib13/TwoStageVAE}.
[A]:
We closely analyze the VAE objective function and draw novel conclusions that lead to simple enhancements.