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: We conduct a mathematical analysis on the Batch normalization (BN) effect on gradient backpropagation in residual network training in this work, which is believed to play a critical role in addressing the gradient vanishing/explosion problem. Specifically, by analyzing the mean and variance behavior of the input and the gradient in the forward and backward passes through the BN and residual branches, respectively, we show that they work together to confine the gradient variance to a certain range across residual blocks in backpropagation. As a result, the gradient vanishing/explosion problem is avoided. Furthermore, we use the same analysis to discuss the tradeoff between depth and width of a residual network and demonstrate that shallower yet wider resnets have stronger learning performance than deeper yet thinner resnets.

SOLUTION: Batch normalisation maintains gradient variance throughout training, thus stabilizing optimization.

PROBLEM: We extend the Consensus Network framework to Transductive Consensus Network (TCN), a semi-supervised multi-modal classification framework, and identify its two mechanisms: consensus and classification. By putting forward three variants as ablation studies, we show both mechanisms should be functioning together. Overall, TCNs outperform or align with the best benchmark algorithms when only 20 to 200 labeled data points are available.

SOLUTION: A semi-supervised multi-modal classification framework, TCN, that outperforms various benchmarks.

PROBLEM: We present EDA: easy data augmentation techniques for boosting performance on text classification tasks. EDA consists of four simple but powerful operations: synonym replacement, random insertion, random swap, and random deletion. On five text classification tasks, we show that EDA improves performance for both convolutional and recurrent neural networks. EDA demonstrates particularly strong results for smaller datasets; on average, across five datasets, training with EDA while using only 50% of the available training set achieved the same accuracy as normal training with all available data. We also performed extensive ablation studies and suggest parameters for practical use.

SOLUTION:
Simple text augmentation techniques can significantly boost performance on text classification tasks, especially for small datasets.