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: 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.

SOLUTION: End-to-end learning of invariant representations with variables across examples such as if someone went somewhere then they are there.

PROBLEM: The Deep Image Prior (DIP, Ulyanov et al., 2017) is a fascinating recent approach for recovering images which appear natural, yet is not fully understood. This work aims at shedding some further light on this approach by investigating the properties of the early outputs of the DIP. First, we show that these early iterations demonstrate invariance to adversarial perturbations by classifying progressive DIP outputs and using a novel saliency map approach. Next we explore using DIP as a defence against adversaries, showing good potential. Finally, we examine the adversarial invariancy of the early DIP outputs, and hypothesize that these outputs may remove non-robust image features. By comparing classification confidence values we show some evidence confirming this hypothesis.

SOLUTION: We investigate properties of the recently introduced Deep Image Prior (Ulyanov et al, 2017)

PROBLEM: In search for more accurate predictive models, we customize capsule networks for the learning to diagnose problem. We also propose Spectral Capsule Networks, a novel variation of capsule networks, that converge faster than capsule network with EM routing. Spectral capsule networks consist of spatial coincidence filters that detect entities based on the alignment of extracted features on a one-dimensional linear subspace. Experiments on a public benchmark learning to diagnose dataset not only shows the success of capsule networks on this task, but also confirm the faster convergence of the spectral capsule networks.

SOLUTION:
A new capsule network that converges faster on our healthcare benchmark experiments.