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.

Input: Consider Input: Convolutional networks are not aware of an object's geometric variations, which leads to inefficient utilization of model and data capacity. To overcome this issue, recent works on deformation modeling seek to spatially reconfigure the data towards a common arrangement such that semantic recognition suffers less from deformation. This is typically done by augmenting static operators with learned free-form sampling grids in the image space, dynamically tuned to the data and task for adapting the receptive field. Yet adapting the receptive field does not quite reach the actual goal -- what really matters to the network is the *effective* receptive field (ERF), which reflects how much each pixel contributes. It is thus natural to design other approaches to adapt the ERF directly during runtime. In this work, we instantiate one possible solution as Deformable Kernels (DKs), a family of novel and generic convolutional operators for handling object deformations by directly adapting the ERF while leaving the receptive field untouched. At the heart of our method is the ability to resample the original kernel space towards recovering the deformation of objects. This approach is justified with theoretical insights that the ERF is strictly determined by data sampling locations and kernel values. We implement DKs as generic drop-in replacements of rigid kernels and conduct a series of empirical studies whose results conform with our theories. Over several tasks and standard base models, our approach compares favorably against prior works that adapt during runtime. In addition, further experiments suggest a working mechanism orthogonal and complementary to previous works.

Output: Don't deform your convolutions -- deform your kernels.


Input: Consider Input: Unsupervised bilingual dictionary induction (UBDI) is useful for unsupervised machine translation and for cross-lingual transfer of models into low-resource languages. One approach to UBDI is to align word vector spaces in different languages using Generative adversarial networks (GANs) with linear generators, achieving state-of-the-art performance for several language pairs. For some pairs, however, GAN-based induction is unstable or completely fails to align the vector spaces. We focus on cases where linear transformations provably exist, but the performance of GAN-based UBDI depends heavily on the model initialization. We show that the instability depends on the shape and density of the vector sets, but not on noise; it is the result of local optima, but neither over-parameterization nor changing the batch size or the learning rate consistently reduces instability. Nevertheless, we can stabilize GAN-based UBDI through best-of-N model selection, based on an unsupervised stopping criterion.

Output: An empirical investigation of GAN-based alignment of word vector spaces, focusing on cases, where linear transformations provably exist, but training is unstable.


Input: Consider Input: A significant challenge for the practical application of reinforcement learning toreal world problems is the need to specify an oracle reward function that correctly defines a task. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to avoid this challenge by instead inferring a reward function from expert behavior.   While appealing, it can be impractically expensive to collect datasets of demonstrations that cover the variation common in the real world (e.g. opening any type of door). Thus in practice, IRL must commonly be performed with only a limited set of demonstrations where it can be exceedingly difficult to unambiguously recover a reward function. In this work, we exploit the insight that demonstrations from other tasks can be used to constrain the set of possible reward functions by learning a "prior" that is specifically optimized for the ability to infer expressive reward functions from limited numbers of demonstrations.   We demonstrate that our method can efficiently recover rewards from images for novel tasks and provide intuition as to how our approach is analogous to learning a prior.


Output: The applicability of inverse reinforcement learning is often hampered by the expense of collecting expert demonstrations; this paper seeks to broaden its applicability by incorporating prior task information through meta-learning.