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: Human reasoning involves recognising common underlying principles across many examples by utilising variables. The by-products of such reasoning are invariants that capture patterns across examples such as "if someone went somewhere then they are there" without mentioning specific people or places. Humans learn what variables are and how to use them at a young age, and the question this paper addresses is whether machines can also learn and use variables solely from examples without requiring human pre-engineering. We propose Unification Networks that incorporate soft unification into neural networks to learn variables and by doing so lift examples into invariants that can then be used to solve a given task. We evaluate our approach on four datasets to demonstrate that learning invariants captures patterns in the data and can improve performance over baselines.

A: End-to-end learning of invariant representations with variables across examples such as if someone went somewhere then they are there.
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Q: In this paper, a new intrinsic reward generation method for sparse-reward reinforcement learning is proposed based on an ensemble of dynamics models. In the proposed method, the mixture of multiple dynamics models is used to approximate the true unknown transition probability, and the intrinsic reward is designed as the minimum of the surprise seen from each dynamics model to the mixture of the dynamics models. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed intrinsic reward generation method, a working algorithm is constructed by combining the proposed intrinsic reward generation method with the proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm. Numerical results show that for representative locomotion tasks, the proposed model-ensemble-based intrinsic reward generation method outperforms the previous methods based on a single dynamics model.

A: For sparse-reward reinforcement learning, the ensemble of multiple dynamics models is used to generate intrinsic reward designed as the minimum of the surprise.
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Q: We hypothesize that end-to-end neural image captioning systems work seemingly well because they exploit and learn ‘distributional similarity’ in a multimodal feature space, by mapping a test image to similar training images in this space and generating a caption from the same space. To validate our hypothesis, we focus on the ‘image’ side of image captioning, and vary the input image representation but keep the RNN text generation model of a CNN-RNN constant. We propose a sparse bag-of-objects vector as an interpretable representation to investigate our distributional similarity hypothesis. We found that image captioning models (i) are capable of separating structure from noisy input representations; (ii) experience virtually no significant performance loss when a high dimensional representation is compressed to a lower dimensional space; (iii) cluster images with similar visual and linguistic information together; (iv) are heavily reliant on test sets with a similar distribution as the training set; (v) repeatedly generate the same captions by matching images and ‘retrieving’ a caption in the joint visual-textual space. Our experiments all point to one fact: that our distributional similarity hypothesis holds. We conclude that, regardless of the image representation, image captioning systems seem to match images and generate captions in a learned joint image-text semantic subspace.


A:
This paper presents an empirical analysis on the role of different types of image representations and probes the properties of these representations for the task of image captioning.
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