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.

[EX Q]: This paper develops variational continual learning (VCL), a simple but general framework for continual learning that fuses online variational inference (VI) and recent advances in Monte Carlo VI for neural networks. The framework can successfully train both deep discriminative models and deep generative models in complex continual learning settings where existing tasks evolve over time and entirely new tasks emerge. Experimental results show that VCL outperforms state-of-the-art continual learning methods on a variety of tasks, avoiding catastrophic forgetting in a fully automatic way.
[EX A]: This paper develops a principled method for continual learning in deep models.

[EX Q]: Neural network training depends on the structure of the underlying loss landscape, i.e. local minima, saddle points, flat plateaus, and loss barriers. In relation to the structure of the landscape, we study the permutation symmetry of neurons in each layer of a deep neural network, which gives rise not only to multiple equivalent global minima of the loss function but also to critical points in between partner minima. In a network of $d-1$ hidden layers with $n_k$ neurons in layers $k = 1, \ldots, d$, we construct continuous paths between equivalent global minima that lead through a `permutation point' where the input and output weight vectors of two neurons in the same hidden layer $k$ collide and interchange. We show that such permutation points are critical points which lie inside high-dimensional subspaces of equal loss, contributing to the global flatness of the landscape. We also find that a permutation point for the exchange of neurons $i$ and $j$ transits into a flat high-dimensional plateau that enables all $n_k!$ permutations of neurons in a given layer $k$ at the same loss value. Moreover , we introduce higher-order permutation points by exploiting the hierarchical structure in the loss landscapes of neural networks, and find that the number of $K$-th order permutation points is much larger than the (already huge) number of equivalent global minima -- at least by a polynomial factor of order $K$. In two tasks, we demonstrate numerically with our path finding method that continuous paths between partner minima exist: first, in a toy network with a single hidden layer on a function approximation task and, second, in a multilayer network on the MNIST task. Our geometric approach yields a lower bound on the number of critical points generated by weight-space symmetries and provides a simple intuitive link between previous theoretical results and numerical observations.
[EX A]: Weight-space symmetry in neural network landscapes gives rise to numerous number of saddles and flat high-dimensional subspaces.

[EX Q]: Real world images often contain large amounts of private / sensitive information that should be carefully protected without reducing their utilities. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving deep learning framework with a learnable ob- fuscator for the image classification task. Our framework consists of three mod- els: learnable obfuscator, classifier and reconstructor. The learnable obfuscator is used to remove the sensitive information in the images and extract the feature maps from them. The reconstructor plays the role as an attacker, which tries to recover the image from the feature maps extracted by the obfuscator. In order to best protect users’ privacy in images, we design an adversarial training methodol- ogy for our framework to optimize the obfuscator. Through extensive evaluations on real world datasets, both the numerical metrics and the visualization results demonstrate that our framework is qualified to protect users’ privacy and achieve a relatively high accuracy on the image classification task.
[EX A]:
We proposed a novel deep learning image classification framework that can both accurately classify images and protect users' privacy.