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: In this paper we introduce a new speech recognition system, leveraging a simple letter-based ConvNet acoustic model. The acoustic model requires only audio transcription for training -- no alignment annotations, nor any forced alignment step is needed. At inference, our decoder takes only a word list and a language model, and is fed with letter scores from the acoustic model -- no phonetic word lexicon is needed. Key ingredients for the acoustic model are Gated Linear Units and high dropout. We show near state-of-the-art results in word error rate on the LibriSpeech corpus with MFSC features, both on the clean and other configurations.

SOLUTION: A letter-based ConvNet acoustic model leads to a simple and competitive speech recognition pipeline.

PROBLEM: We present Random Partition Relaxation (RPR), a method for strong quantization of the parameters of convolutional neural networks to binary (+1/-1) and ternary (+1/0/-1) values. Starting from a pretrained model, we first quantize the weights and then relax random partitions of them to their continuous values for retraining before quantizing them again and switching to another weight partition for further adaptation. We empirically evaluate the performance of RPR with ResNet-18, ResNet-50 and GoogLeNet on the ImageNet classification task for binary and ternary weight networks. We show accuracies beyond the state-of-the-art for binary- and ternary-weight GoogLeNet and competitive performance for ResNet-18 and ResNet-50 using a SGD-based training method that can easily be integrated into existing frameworks.

SOLUTION: State-of-the-art training method for binary and ternary weight networks based on alternating optimization of randomly relaxed weight partitions

PROBLEM: Federated Learning (FL) refers to learning a high quality global model based on decentralized data storage, without ever copying the raw data. A natural scenario arises with data created on mobile phones by the activity of their users. Given the typical data heterogeneity in such situations, it is natural to ask how can the global model be personalized for every such device, individually. In this work, we point out that the setting of Model Agnostic Meta Learning (MAML), where one optimizes for a fast, gradient-based, few-shot adaptation to a heterogeneous distribution of tasks, has a number of similarities with the objective of personalization for FL. We present FL as a natural source of practical applications for MAML algorithms, and make the following observations. 1) The popular FL algorithm, Federated Averaging, can be interpreted as a meta learning algorithm. 2) Careful fine-tuning can yield a global model with higher accuracy, which is at the same time easier to personalize. However, solely optimizing for the global model accuracy yields a weaker personalization result. 3) A model trained using a standard datacenter optimization method is much harder to personalize, compared to one trained using Federated Averaging, supporting the first claim. These results raise new questions for FL, MAML, and broader ML research.

SOLUTION:
Federated Averaging already is a Meta Learning algorithm, while datacenter-trained methods are significantly harder to personalize.