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: The vast majority of natural sensory data is temporally redundant. For instance, video frames or audio samples which are sampled at nearby points in time tend to have similar values.   Typically, deep learning algorithms take no advantage of this redundancy to reduce computations.   This can be an obscene waste of energy.   We present a variant on backpropagation for neural networks in which computation scales with the rate of change of the data - not the rate at which we process the data.   We do this by implementing a form of Predictive Coding wherein neurons communicate a combination of their state, and their temporal change in state, and quantize this signal using Sigma-Delta modulation.   Intriguingly, this simple communication rule give rise to units that resemble biologically-inspired leaky integrate-and-fire neurons, and to a spike-timing-dependent weight-update similar to Spike-Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP), a synaptic learning rule observed in the brain.   We demonstrate that on MNIST, on a temporal variant of MNIST, and on Youtube-BB, a dataset with videos in the wild, our algorithm performs about as well as a standard deep network trained with backpropagation, despite only communicating discrete values between layers.  

SOLUTION: An algorithm for training neural networks efficiently on temporally redundant data.

PROBLEM: Deep learning models are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. A practical adversarial attack should require as little as possible knowledge of attacked models T. Current substitute attacks need pre-trained models to generate adversarial examples and their attack success rates heavily rely on the transferability of adversarial examples. Current score-based and decision-based attacks require lots of queries for the T. In this study, we propose a novel adversarial imitation attack. First, it produces a replica of the T by a two-player game like the generative adversarial networks (GANs). The objective of the generative model G is to generate examples which lead D returning different outputs with T. The objective of the discriminative model D is to output the same labels with T under the same inputs. Then, the adversarial examples generated by D are utilized to fool the T. Compared with the current substitute attacks, imitation attack can use less training data to produce a replica of T and improve the transferability of adversarial examples. Experiments demonstrate that our imitation attack requires less training data than the black-box substitute attacks, but achieves an attack success rate close to the white-box attack on unseen data with no query.

SOLUTION: A novel adversarial imitation attack to fool machine learning models.

PROBLEM: Despite considerable advances in neural language modeling, it remains an open question what the best decoding strategy is for text generation from a language model (e.g.  to generate a story).   The counter-intuitive empirical observation is that even though the use of likelihood as training objective leads to high quality models for a broad range of language understanding tasks, maximization-based decoding methods such as beam search lead to degeneration — output text that is bland, incoherent, or gets stuck in repetitive loops.

 To address this we propose Nucleus Sampling, a simple but effective method to draw considerably  higher  quality  text  out  of  neural  language  models. Our  approach avoids text degeneration by truncating the unreliable tail of the probability distribution, sampling from the dynamic  nucleus  of  tokens containing the vast majority of the probability mass.

 To properly examine current maximization-based and stochastic decoding methods, we compare generations from each of these methods to the distribution of human text along several axes such as likelihood, diversity, and repetition. Our results show that (1) maximization is an inappropriate decoding objective for open-ended text generation, (2) the probability distributions of the best current language models have an unreliable tail which needs to be truncated during generation and (3) Nucleus Sampling is the best decoding strategy for generating long-form text that is both high-quality — as measured by human evaluation — and as diverse as human-written text.

SOLUTION:
Current language generation systems either aim for high likelihood and devolve into generic repetition or miscalibrate their stochasticity—we provide evidence of both and propose a solution: Nucleus Sampling.