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: Convolutional networks are not aware of an object's geometric variations, which leads to inefficient utilization of model and data capacity. To overcome this issue, recent works on deformation modeling seek to spatially reconfigure the data towards a common arrangement such that semantic recognition suffers less from deformation. This is typically done by augmenting static operators with learned free-form sampling grids in the image space, dynamically tuned to the data and task for adapting the receptive field. Yet adapting the receptive field does not quite reach the actual goal -- what really matters to the network is the *effective* receptive field (ERF), which reflects how much each pixel contributes. It is thus natural to design other approaches to adapt the ERF directly during runtime. In this work, we instantiate one possible solution as Deformable Kernels (DKs), a family of novel and generic convolutional operators for handling object deformations by directly adapting the ERF while leaving the receptive field untouched. At the heart of our method is the ability to resample the original kernel space towards recovering the deformation of objects. This approach is justified with theoretical insights that the ERF is strictly determined by data sampling locations and kernel values. We implement DKs as generic drop-in replacements of rigid kernels and conduct a series of empirical studies whose results conform with our theories. Over several tasks and standard base models, our approach compares favorably against prior works that adapt during runtime. In addition, further experiments suggest a working mechanism orthogonal and complementary to previous works.

SOLUTION: Don't deform your convolutions -- deform your kernels.

PROBLEM: We present Cross-View Training (CVT), a simple but effective method for deep semi-supervised learning. On labeled examples, the model is trained with standard cross-entropy loss. On an unlabeled example, the model first performs inference (acting as a "teacher") to produce soft targets. The model then learns from these soft targets (acting as a ''"student"). We deviate from prior work by adding multiple auxiliary student prediction layers to the model. The input to each student layer is a sub-network of the full model that has a restricted view of the input (e.g., only seeing one region of an image). The students can learn from the teacher (the full model) because the teacher sees more of each example. Concurrently, the students improve the quality of the representations used by the teacher as they learn to make predictions with limited data. When combined with Virtual Adversarial Training, CVT improves upon the current state-of-the-art on semi-supervised CIFAR-10 and semi-supervised SVHN. We also apply CVT to train models on five natural language processing tasks using hundreds of millions of sentences of unlabeled data. On all tasks CVT substantially outperforms supervised learning alone, resulting in models that improve upon or are competitive with the current state-of-the-art.

SOLUTION: Self-training with different views of the input gives excellent results for semi-supervised image recognition, sequence tagging, and dependency parsing.

PROBLEM: We introduce a new approach to estimate continuous actions using actor-critic algorithms for reinforcement learning problems. Policy gradient methods usually predict one continuous action estimate or parameters of a presumed distribution (most commonly Gaussian) for any given state which might not be optimal as it may not capture the complete description of the target distribution. Our approach instead predicts M actions with the policy network (actor) and then uniformly sample one action during training as well as testing at each state. This allows the agent to learn a simple stochastic policy that has an easy to compute expected return. In all experiments, this facilitates better exploration of the state space during training and converges to a better policy.

SOLUTION:
We introduce a novel reinforcement learning algorithm, that predicts multiple actions and samples from them.