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: Korf, Reid, and Edelkamp introduced a formula to predict the number of nodes IDA* will expand on a single iteration for a given consistent heuristic, and experimentally demonstrated that it could make very accurate predictions. In this paper we show that, in addition to requiring the heuristic to be consistent, their formula’s predictions are accurate only at levels of the brute-force search tree where the heuristic values obey the unconditional distribution that they defined and then used in their formula. We then propose a new formula that works well without these requirements, i.e., it can make accurate predictions of IDA*’s performance for inconsistent heuristics and if the heuristic values in any level do not obey the unconditional distribution. In order to achieve this we introduce the conditional distribution of heuristic values which is a generalization of their unconditional heuristic distribution. We also provide extensions of our formula that handle individual start states and the augmentation of IDA* with bidirectional pathmax (BPMX), a technique for propagating heuristic values when inconsistent heuristics are used. Experimental results demonstrate the accuracy of our new method and all its variations.

SOLUTION: Predicting the Performance of IDA* using Conditional Distributions

PROBLEM: This paper is an empirical study of the distributed deep learning for a question answering subtask: answer selection. Comparison studies of SGD, MSGD, DOWNPOUR and EASGD/EAMSGD algorithms have been presented. Experimental results show that the message passing interface based distributed framework can accelerate the convergence speed at a sublinear scale. This paper demonstrates the importance of distributed training: with 120 workers, an 83x speedup is achievable and running time is decreased from 107.9 hours to 1.3 hours, which will benefit the productivity significantly.

SOLUTION: Distributed Deep Learning for Answer Selection

PROBLEM: We investigate adversarial attacks for autoencoders. We propose a procedure that distorts the input image to mislead the autoencoder in reconstructing a completely different target image. We attack the internal latent representations, attempting to make the adversarial input produce an internal representation as similar as possible as the target’s. We find that autoencoders are much more robust to the attack than classifiers: while some examples have tolerably small input distortion, and reasonable similarity to the target image, there is a quasi-linear trade-off between those aims. We report results on MNIST and SVHN datasets, and also test regular deterministic autoencoders, reaching similar conclusions in all cases. Finally, we show that the usual adversarial attack for classifiers, while being much easier, also presents a direct proportion between distortion on the input, and misdirection on the output. That proportionality however is hidden by the normalization of the output, which maps a linear layer into non-linear probabilities.

SOLUTION:
Adversarial Images for Variational Autoencoders