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.
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Question: Beyond understanding what is being discussed, human communication requires an awareness of what someone is feeling. One challenge for dialogue agents is recognizing feelings in the conversation partner and replying accordingly, a key communicative skill that is trivial for humans. Research in this area is made difficult by the paucity of suitable publicly available datasets both for emotion and dialogues. This work proposes a new task for empathetic dialogue generation and EmpatheticDialogues, a dataset of 25k conversations grounded in emotional situations to facilitate training and evaluating dialogue systems. Our experiments indicate that dialogue models that use our dataset are perceived to be more empathetic by human evaluators, while improving on other metrics as well (e.g. perceived relevance of responses, BLEU scores), compared to models merely trained on large-scale Internet conversation data. We also present empirical comparisons of several ways to improve the performance of a given model by leveraging existing models or datasets without requiring lengthy re-training of the full model.

Answer: We improve existing dialogue systems for responding to people sharing personal stories, incorporating emotion prediction representations and also release a new benchmark and dataset of empathetic dialogues.

Question: Distributed computing can significantly reduce the training time of neural networks. Despite its potential, however, distributed training has not been widely adopted: scaling the training process is difficult, and existing SGD methods require substantial tuning of hyperparameters and learning schedules to achieve sufficient accuracy when increasing the number of workers. In practice, such tuning can be prohibitively expensive given the huge number of potential hyperparameter configurations and the effort required to test each one.

We propose DANA, a novel approach that scales out-of-the-box to large clusters using the same hyperparameters and learning schedule optimized for training on a single worker, while maintaining similar final accuracy without additional overhead. DANA estimates the future value of model parameters by adapting Nesterov Accelerated Gradient to a distributed setting, and so mitigates the effect of gradient staleness, one of the main difficulties in scaling SGD to more workers.

Evaluation on three state-of-the-art network architectures and three datasets shows that DANA scales as well as or better than existing work without having to tune any hyperparameters or tweak the learning schedule. For example, DANA achieves 75.73% accuracy on ImageNet when training ResNet-50 with 16 workers, similar to the non-distributed baseline.

Answer: A new distributed asynchronous SGD algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on existing architectures without any additional tuning or overhead.

Question: Catastrophic forgetting poses a grand challenge for continual learning systems, which prevents neural networks from protecting old knowledge while learning new tasks sequentially. We propose a Differentiable Hebbian Plasticity (DHP) Softmax layer which adds a fast learning plastic component to the slow weights of the softmax output layer. The DHP Softmax behaves as a compressed episodic memory that reactivates existing memory traces, while creating new ones. We demonstrate the flexibility of our model by combining it with existing well-known consolidation methods to prevent catastrophic forgetting. We evaluate our approach on the Permuted MNIST and Split MNIST benchmarks, and introduce Imbalanced Permuted MNIST a dataset that combines the challenges of class imbalance and concept drift. Our model requires no additional hyperparameters and outperforms comparable baselines by reducing forgetting.

Answer:
Hebbian plastic weights can behave as a compressed episodic memory storage in neural networks; improving their ability to alleviate catastrophic forgetting in continual learning.