TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
PROBLEM: Multitask learning algorithms are typically designed assuming some fixed, a priori known latent structure shared by all the tasks. However, it is usually unclear what type of latent task structure is the most appropriate for a given multitask learning problem. Ideally, the “right” latent task structure should be learned in a data-driven manner. We present a flexible, nonparametric Bayesian model that posits a mixture of factor analyzers structure on the tasks. The nonparametric aspect makes the model expressive enough to subsume many existing models of latent task structures (e.g, meanregularized tasks, clustered tasks, low-rank or linear/non-linear subspace assumption on tasks, etc.). Moreover, it can also learn more general task structures, addressing the shortcomings of such models. We present a variational inference algorithm for our model. Experimental results on synthetic and realworld datasets, on both regression and classification problems, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

SOLUTION: Flexible Modeling of Latent Task Structures in Multitask Learning

PROBLEM: Recently, sequence-to-sequence model by using encoder-decoder neural network has gained popularity for automatic speech recognition (ASR). The architecture commonly uses an attentional mechanism which allows the model to learn alignments between source speech sequence and target text sequence. Most attentional mechanisms used today is based on a global attention property which requires a computation of a weighted summarization of the whole input sequence generated by encoder states. However, it is computationally expensive and often produces misalignment on the longer input sequence. Furthermore, it does not fit with monotonous or left-to-right nature in speech recognition task. In this paper, we propose a novel attention mechanism that has local and monotonic properties. Various ways to control those properties are also explored. Experimental results demonstrate that encoder-decoder based ASR with local monotonic attention could achieve significant performance improvements and reduce the computational complexity in comparison with the one that used the standard global attention architecture.

SOLUTION: Local Monotonic Attention Mechanism for End-to-End Speech Recognition

PROBLEM: A series of monte carlo studies were performed to compare the behavior of some alternative procedures for reasoning under uncertainty. The behavior of several Bayesian, linear model and default reasoning procedures were examined in the context of increasing levels of calibration error. The most interesting result is that Bayesian procedures tended to output more extreme posterior belief values (posterior beliefs near 0.0 or 1.0) than other techniques, but the linear models were relatively less likely to output strong support for an erroneous conclusion. Also, accounting for the probabilistic dependencies between evidence items was important for both Bayesian and linear updating procedures.

SOLUTION:
Reasoning under Uncertainty: