TASK DEFINITION: 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.
PROBLEM: Dramatic advances in generative models have resulted in near photographic quality for artificially rendered faces, animals and other objects in the natural world. In spite of such advances, a higher level understanding of vision and imagery does not arise from exhaustively modeling an object,  but instead identifying higher-level  attributes  that  best  summarize  the  aspects  of  an  object.    In  this  work  we attempt  to  model  the  drawing  process  of  fonts  by  building  sequential generative models of vector graphics.   This model has the benefit of providing a scale-invariant representation for imagery whose latent representation may be systematically manipulated and exploited to perform style propagation. We demonstrate these results on a large dataset of fonts and highlight how such a model captures the statistical dependencies and richness of this dataset. We envision that our model can find use as a tool for designers to facilitate font design.

SOLUTION: We attempt to model the drawing process of fonts by building sequential generative models of vector graphics (SVGs), a highly structured representation of font characters.

PROBLEM: Monitoring patients in ICU is a challenging and high-cost task. Hence, predicting the condition of patients during their ICU stay can help provide better acute care and plan the hospital's resources. There has been continuous progress in machine learning research for ICU management, and most of this work has focused on using time series signals recorded by ICU instruments. In our work, we show that adding clinical notes as another modality improves the performance of the model for three benchmark tasks: in-hospital mortality prediction, modeling decompensation, and length of stay forecasting that play an important role in ICU management. While the time-series data is measured at regular intervals, doctor notes are charted at irregular times, making it challenging to model them together. We propose a method to model them jointly, achieving considerable improvement across benchmark tasks over baseline time-series model.

SOLUTION: We demostarte that using clinical notes in conjuntion with ICU instruments data improves the perfomance on ICU management benchmark tasks

PROBLEM: Conversational question answering (CQA) is a novel QA task that requires the understanding of dialogue context. Different from traditional single-turn machine reading comprehension (MRC), CQA is a comprehensive task comprised of passage reading, coreference resolution, and contextual understanding. In this paper, we propose an innovative contextualized attention-based deep neural network, SDNet, to fuse context into traditional MRC models. Our model leverages both inter-attention and self-attention to comprehend the conversation and passage. Furthermore, we demonstrate a novel method to integrate the BERT contextual model as a sub-module in our network. Empirical results show the effectiveness of SDNet. On the CoQA leaderboard, it outperforms the previous best model's F1 score by 1.6%. Our ensemble model further improves the F1 score by 2.7%.

SOLUTION:
A neural method for conversational question answering with attention mechanism and a novel usage of BERT as contextual embedder