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.

We propose vq-wav2vec to learn discrete representations of audio segments through a wav2vec-style self-supervised context prediction task. The algorithm uses either a gumbel softmax or online k-means clustering to quantize the dense representations. Discretization enables the direct application of algorithms from the NLP community which require discrete inputs. Experiments show that BERT pre-training achieves a new state of the art on TIMIT phoneme classification and WSJ speech recognition.
Learn how to quantize speech signal and apply algorithms requiring discrete inputs to audio data such as BERT.

In this paper we use the geometric properties of the optimal transport (OT) problem and the Wasserstein distances to define a prior distribution for the latent space of an auto-encoder. We introduce Sliced-Wasserstein Auto-Encoders (SWAE), that enable one to shape the distribution of the latent space into any samplable probability distribution without the need for training an adversarial network or having a likelihood function specified. In short, we regularize the auto-encoder loss with the sliced-Wasserstein distance between the distribution of the encoded training samples and a samplable prior distribution. We show that the proposed formulation has an efficient numerical solution that provides similar capabilities to Wasserstein Auto-Encoders (WAE) and Variational Auto-Encoders (VAE), while benefiting from an embarrassingly simple implementation. We provide extensive error analysis for our algorithm, and show its merits on three benchmark datasets.
In this paper we use the sliced-Wasserstein distance to shape the latent distribution of an auto-encoder into any samplable prior distribution. 

Despite significant advances in the field of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), today's algorithms still fail to learn human-level policies consistently over a set of diverse tasks such as Atari 2600 games. We identify three key challenges that any algorithm needs to master in order to perform well on all games:  processing diverse reward distributions, reasoning over long time horizons, and exploring efficiently.   In this paper, we propose an algorithm that addresses each of these challenges and is able to learn human-level policies on nearly all Atari games. A new transformed Bellman operator allows our algorithm to process rewards of varying densities and scales; an auxiliary temporal consistency loss allows us to train stably using a discount factor of 0.999 (instead of 0.99) extending the effective planning horizon by an order of magnitude; and we ease the exploration problem by using human demonstrations that guide the agent towards rewarding states. When tested on a set of 42 Atari games, our algorithm exceeds the performance  of an average human on 40 games using a common set of hyper parameters.

Ape-X DQfD = Distributed (many actors + one learner + prioritized replay) DQN with demonstrations optimizing the unclipped 0.999-discounted return on Atari.