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.

[Q]: We investigate methods for semi-supervised learning (SSL) of a neural linear-chain conditional random field (CRF) for Named Entity Recognition (NER) by treating the tagger as the amortized variational posterior in a generative model of text given tags. We first illustrate how to incorporate a CRF in a VAE, enabling end-to-end training on semi-supervised data. We then investigate a series of increasingly complex deep generative models of tokens given tags enabled by end-to-end optimization, comparing the proposed models against supervised and strong CRF SSL baselines on the Ontonotes5 NER dataset. We find that our best proposed model consistently improves performance by $\approx 1\%$ F1 in low- and moderate-resource regimes and easily addresses degenerate model behavior in a more difficult, partially supervised setting.
[A]: We embed a CRF in a VAE of tokens and NER tags for semi-supervised learning and show improvements in low-resource settings.


[Q]: Abstraction of Markov Decision Processes is a useful tool for solving complex problems, as it can ignore unimportant aspects of an environment, simplifying the process of learning an optimal policy. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for finding abstract MDPs in environments with continuous state spaces. It is based on MDP homomorphisms, a structure-preserving mapping between MDPs. We demonstrate our algorithm's ability to learns abstractions from collected experience and show how to reuse the abstractions to guide exploration in new tasks the agent encounters. Our novel task transfer method beats a baseline based on a deep Q-network.
[A]: We create abstract models of environments from experience and use them to learn new tasks faster.


[Q]: Attention mechanisms have advanced the state of the art in several machine learning tasks. Despite significant empirical gains, there is a lack of theoretical analyses on understanding their effectiveness. In this paper, we address this problem by studying the landscape of population and empirical loss functions of attention-based neural networks. Our results show that, under mild assumptions, every local minimum of a two-layer global attention model has low prediction error, and attention models require lower sample complexity than models not employing attention. We then extend our analyses to the popular self-attention model, proving that they deliver consistent predictions with a more expressive class of functions. Additionally, our theoretical results provide several guidelines for designing attention mechanisms. Our findings are validated with satisfactory experimental results on MNIST and IMDB reviews dataset.
[A]:
We analyze the loss landscape of neural networks with attention and explain why attention is helpful in training neural networks to achieve good performance.