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: Aspect extraction in online product reviews is a key task in sentiment analysis and opinion mining. Training supervised neural networks for aspect extraction is not possible when ground truth aspect labels are not available, while the unsupervised neural topic models fail to capture the particular aspects of interest. In this work, we propose a weakly supervised approach for training neural networks for aspect extraction in cases where only a small set of seed words, i.e., keywords that describe an aspect, are available. Our main contributions are as follows. First, we show that current weakly supervised networks fail to leverage the predictive power of the available seed words by comparing them to a simple bag-of-words classifier.   Second, we propose a distillation approach for aspect extraction where the seed words are considered by the bag-of-words classifier (teacher) and distilled to the parameters of a neural network (student). Third, we show that regularization encourages the student to consider non-seed words for classification and, as a result, the student outperforms the teacher, which only considers the seed words. Finally, we empirically show that our proposed distillation approach outperforms (by up to 34.4% in F1 score) previous weakly supervised approaches for aspect extraction in six domains of Amazon product reviews.

SOLUTION: We effectively leverage a few keywords as weak supervision for training neural networks for aspect extraction.

PROBLEM: Plan recognition aims to look for target plans to best explain the observed actions based on plan libraries and/or domain models. Despite the success of previous approaches on plan recognition, they mostly rely on correct action observations. 
 Recent advances in visual activity recognition have the potential of enabling applications such as automated video surveillance. Effective approaches for such problems would require the ability to recognize the plans of agents from video information. Traditional plan recognition algorithms rely on access to detailed planning domain models. One recent promising direction involves learning approximate (or shallow) domain models directly from the observed activity sequences. Such plan recognition approaches expect observed action sequences as inputs. However, visual inference results are often noisy and uncertain, typically represented as a distribution over possible actions. In this work, we develop a visual plan recognition framework that recognizes plans with an approximate domain model learned from uncertain visual data.

SOLUTION: Handling Uncertainty in Visual Perception for Plan Recognition

PROBLEM: Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have proven successful in a variety of domains. However, tasks with sparse rewards remain challenging when the state space is large. Goal-oriented tasks are among the most typical problems in this domain, where a reward can only be received when the final goal is accomplished. In this work, we propose a potential solution to such problems with the introduction of an experience-based tendency reward mechanism, which provides the agent with additional hints based on a discriminative learning on past experiences during an automated reverse curriculum. This mechanism not only provides dense additional learning signals on what states lead to success, but also allows the agent to retain only this tendency reward instead of the whole histories of experience during multi-phase curriculum learning. We extensively study the advantages of our method on the standard sparse reward domains like Maze and Super Mario Bros and show that our method performs more efficiently and robustly than prior approaches in tasks with long time horizons and large state space. In addition, we demonstrate that using an optional keyframe scheme with very small quantity of key states, our approach can solve difficult robot manipulation challenges directly from perception and sparse rewards.

SOLUTION:
We propose Tendency RL to efficiently solve goal-oriented tasks with large state space using automated curriculum learning and discriminative shaping reward, which has the potential to tackle robot manipulation tasks with perception.