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 consider the problem of unsupervised learning of a low dimensional, interpretable, latent state of a video containing a moving object. The problem of distilling dynamics from pixels has been extensively considered through the lens of graphical/state space models that exploit Markov structure for cheap computation and structured graphical model priors for enforcing interpretability on latent representations. We take a step towards extending these approaches by discarding the Markov structure; instead, repurposing the recently proposed Gaussian Process Prior Variational Autoencoder for learning sophisticated latent trajectories. We describe the model and perform experiments on a synthetic dataset and see that the model reliably reconstructs smooth dynamics exhibiting U-turns and loops. We also observe that this model may be trained without any beta-annealing or freeze-thaw of training parameters. Training is performed purely end-to-end on the unmodified evidence lower bound objective. This is in contrast to previous works, albeit for slightly different use cases, where application specific training tricks are often required.

SOLUTION: We learn sohpisticated trajectories of an object purely from pixels with a toy video dataset by using a VAE structure with a Gaussian process prior.

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: Deep reinforcement learning has achieved great success in many previously difficult reinforcement learning tasks, yet recent studies show that deep RL agents are also unavoidably susceptible to adversarial perturbations, similar to deep neural networks in classification tasks. Prior works mostly focus on model-free adversarial attacks and agents with discrete actions. In this work, we study the problem of continuous control agents in deep RL with adversarial attacks and propose the first two-step algorithm based on learned model dynamics. Extensive experiments on various MuJoCo domains (Cartpole, Fish, Walker, Humanoid) demonstrate that our proposed framework is much more effective and efficient than model-free based attacks baselines in degrading agent performance as well as driving agents to unsafe states.

SOLUTION:
We study the problem of continuous control agents in deep RL with adversarial attacks and proposed a two-step algorithm based on learned model dynamics.