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: This paper proposes a dual variational autoencoder (DualVAE), a framework for generating images corresponding to multiclass labels. Recent research on conditional generative models, such as the Conditional VAE, exhibit image transfer by changing labels. However, when the dimension of multiclass labels is large, these models cannot change images corresponding to labels, because learning multiple distributions of the corresponding class is necessary to transfer an image. This leads to the lack of training data. Therefore, instead of conditioning with labels, we condition with latent vectors that include label information. DualVAE divides one distribution of the latent space by linear decision boundaries using labels. Consequently, DualVAE can easily transfer an image by moving a latent vector toward a decision boundary and is robust to the missing values of multiclass labels. To evaluate our proposed method, we introduce a conditional inception score (CIS) for measuring how much an image changes to the target class. We evaluate the images transferred by DualVAE using the CIS in CelebA datasets and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in a multiclass setting.

SOLUTION:  a new framework using dual space for generating images corresponding to multiclass labels when the number of class is large

PROBLEM: Rewards are sparse in the real world and most of today's reinforcement learning algorithms struggle with such sparsity. One solution to this problem is to allow the agent to create rewards for itself - thus making rewards dense and more suitable for learning. In particular, inspired by curious behaviour in animals, observing something novel could be rewarded with a bonus. Such bonus is summed up with the real task reward - making it possible for RL algorithms to learn from the combined reward. We propose a new curiosity method which uses episodic memory to form the novelty bonus. To determine the bonus, the current observation is compared with the observations in memory. Crucially, the comparison is done based on how many environment steps it takes to reach the current observation from those in memory - which incorporates rich information about environment dynamics. This allows us to overcome the known "couch-potato" issues of prior work - when the agent finds a way to instantly gratify itself by exploiting actions which lead to hardly predictable consequences. We test our approach in visually rich 3D environments in ViZDoom, DMLab and MuJoCo. In navigational tasks from ViZDoom and DMLab, our agent outperforms the state-of-the-art curiosity method ICM. In MuJoCo, an ant equipped with our curiosity module learns locomotion out of the first-person-view curiosity only. The code is available at https://github.com/google-research/episodic-curiosity/.

SOLUTION: We propose a novel model of curiosity based on episodic memory and the ideas of reachability which allows us to overcome the known "couch-potato" issues of prior work.

PROBLEM: A key goal in neuroscience is to understand brain mechanisms of cognitive functions. An emerging approach is to study “brain states” dynamics using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). So far in the literature, brain states have typically been studied using 30 seconds of fMRI data or more, and it is unclear to which extent brain states can be reliably identified from very short time series. In this project, we applied graph convolutional networks (GCN) to decode brain activity over short time windows in a task fMRI dataset, i.e. associate a given window of fMRI time series with the task used. Starting with a populational brain graph with nodes defined by a parcellation of cerebral cortex and the adjacent matrix extracted from functional connectome, GCN takes a short series of fMRI volumes as input, generates high-level domain-specific graph representations, and then predicts the corresponding cognitive state. We investigated the performance of this GCN "cognitive state annotation" in the Human Connectome Project (HCP) database, which features 21 different experimental conditions spanning seven major cognitive domains, and high temporal resolution task fMRI data. Using a 10-second window, the 21 cognitive states were identified with an excellent average test accuracy of 89% (chance level 4.8%). As the HCP task battery was designed to selectively activate a wide range of specialized functional networks, we anticipate the GCN annotation to be applicable as a base model for other transfer learning applications, for instance, adapting to new task domains.

SOLUTION:
Using a 10s window of fMRI signals, our GCN model identified 21 different task conditions from HCP dataset with a test accuracy of 89%.