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.

[EX Q]: Many real-world sequential decision-making problems can be formulated as optimal control with high-dimensional observations and unknown dynamics. A promising approach is to embed the high-dimensional observations into a lower-dimensional latent representation space, estimate the latent dynamics model, then utilize this model for control in the latent space. An important open question is how to learn a representation that is amenable to existing control algorithms? In this paper, we focus on learning representations for locally-linear control algorithms, such as iterative LQR (iLQR). By formulating and analyzing the representation learning problem from an optimal control perspective, we establish three underlying principles that the learned representation should comprise: 1) accurate prediction in the observation space, 2) consistency between latent and observation space dynamics, and 3) low curvature in the latent space transitions. These principles naturally correspond to a loss function that consists of three terms: prediction, consistency, and curvature (PCC). Crucially, to make PCC tractable, we derive an amortized variational bound for the PCC loss function. Extensive experiments on benchmark domains demonstrate that the new variational-PCC learning algorithm benefits from significantly more stable and reproducible training, and leads to superior control performance. Further ablation studies give support to the importance of all three PCC components for learning a good latent space for control.
[EX A]: Learning embedding for control with high-dimensional observations

[EX Q]: 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.
[EX A]: Don't deform your convolutions -- deform your kernels.

[EX Q]: To leverage crowd-sourced data to train multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) models that can synthesize clean speech for all speakers, it is essential to learn disentangled representations which can independently control the speaker identity and background noise in generated signals. However, learning such representations can be challenging, due to the lack of labels describing the recording conditions of each training example, and the fact that speakers and recording conditions are often correlated, e.g. since users often make many recordings using the same equipment. This paper proposes three components to address this problem by: (1) formulating a conditional generative model with factorized latent variables, (2) using data augmentation to add noise that is not correlated with speaker identity and whose label is known during training, and (3) using adversarial factorization to improve disentanglement. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can disentangle speaker and noise attributes even if they are correlated in the training data, and can be used to consistently synthesize clean speech for all speakers. Ablation studies verify the importance of each proposed component.
[EX A]:
Data augmentation and adversarial training are very effective for disentangling correlated speaker and noise, enabling independent control of each attribute for text-to-speech synthesis.