instruction:
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.
question:
Recent DNN pruning algorithms have succeeded in reducing the number of parameters in fully connected layers often with little or no drop in classification accuracy. However most of the existing pruning schemes either have to be applied during training or require a costly retraining procedure after pruning to regain classification accuracy. In this paper we propose a cheap pruning algorithm based on difference of convex (DC) optimisation. We also provide theoretical analysis for the growth in the Generalisation Error (GE) of the new pruned network. Our method can be used with any convex regulariser and allows for a controlled degradation in classification accuracy while being orders of magnitude faster than competing approaches. Experiments on common feedforward neural networks show that for sparsity levels above 90% our method achieves 10% higher classification accuracy compared to Hard Thresholding.
answer:
A fast pruning algorithm for fully connected DNN layers with theoretical analysis of degradation in Generalisation Error.


question:
As distributed approaches to natural language semantics have developed and diversified, embedders for linguistic units larger than words (e.g., sentences) have come to play an increasingly important role.   To date, such embedders have been evaluated using benchmark tasks (e.g., GLUE) and linguistic probes.   We propose a comparative approach, nearest neighbor overlap (N2O), that quantifies similarity between embedders in a task-agnostic manner.   N2O requires only a collection of examples and is simple to understand: two embedders are more similar if, for the same set of inputs, there is greater overlap between the inputs' nearest neighbors.   We use N2O to compare 21 sentence embedders and show the effects of different design choices and architectures.
answer:
We propose nearest neighbor overlap, a procedure which quantifies similarity between embedders in a task-agnostic manner, and use it to compare 21 sentence embedders.


question:
Decisions made by machine learning systems have increasing influence on the world. Yet it is common for machine learning algorithms to assume that no such influence exists. An example is the use of the i.i.d. assumption in online learning for applications such as content recommendation, where the (choice of) content displayed can change users' perceptions and preferences, or even drive them away, causing a shift in the distribution of users. Generally speaking, it is possible for an algorithm to change the distribution of its own inputs. We introduce the term self-induced distributional shift (SIDS) to describe this phenomenon. A large body of work in reinforcement learning and causal machine learning aims to deal with distributional shift caused by deploying learning systems previously trained offline. Our goal is similar, but distinct: we point out that changes to the learning algorithm, such as the introduction of meta-learning, can reveal hidden incentives for distributional shift (HIDS), and aim to diagnose and prevent problems associated with hidden incentives. We design a simple  environment as a "unit test" for HIDS, as well as a content recommendation environment which allows us to disentangle different types of SIDS.   We demonstrate the potential for HIDS to cause unexpected or undesirable behavior in these environments, and propose and test a mitigation strategy. 
answer:

Performance metrics are incomplete specifications; the ends don't always justify the means.