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: Large-scale distributed training requires significant communication bandwidth for gradient exchange that limits the scalability of multi-node training, and requires expensive high-bandwidth network infrastructure. The situation gets even worse with distributed training on mobile devices (federated learning), which suffers from higher latency, lower throughput, and intermittent poor connections. In this paper, we find 99.9% of the gradient exchange in distributed SGD is redundant, and propose Deep Gradient Compression (DGC) to greatly reduce the communication bandwidth. To preserve accuracy during compression, DGC employs four methods: momentum correction, local gradient clipping, momentum factor masking, and warm-up training. We have applied Deep Gradient Compression to image classification, speech recognition, and language modeling with multiple datasets including Cifar10, ImageNet, Penn Treebank, and Librispeech Corpus. On these scenarios, Deep Gradient Compression achieves a gradient compression ratio from 270x to 600x without losing accuracy, cutting the gradient size of ResNet-50 from 97MB to 0.35MB, and for DeepSpeech from 488MB to 0.74MB. Deep gradient compression enables large-scale distributed training on inexpensive commodity 1Gbps Ethernet and facilitates distributed training on mobile.

SOLUTION: we find 99.9% of the gradient exchange in distributed SGD is redundant; we reduce the communication bandwidth by two orders of magnitude without losing accuracy.

PROBLEM: As distributed approaches to natural language semantics have developed and diversified, embedders for linguistic units larger than words (e.g., sentences) have come to play an increasingly important role. To date, such embedders have been evaluated using benchmark tasks (e.g., GLUE) and linguistic probes. We propose a comparative approach, nearest neighbor overlap (N2O), that quantifies similarity between embedders in a task-agnostic manner. N2O requires only a collection of examples and is simple to understand: two embedders are more similar if, for the same set of inputs, there is greater overlap between the inputs' nearest neighbors. We use N2O to compare 21 sentence embedders and show the effects of different design choices and architectures.

SOLUTION: We propose nearest neighbor overlap, a procedure which quantifies similarity between embedders in a task-agnostic manner, and use it to compare 21 sentence embedders.

PROBLEM: We present a novel approach to train a natural media painting using reinforcement learning. Given a reference image, our formulation is based on stroke-based rendering that imitates human drawing and can be learned from scratch without supervision. Our painting agent computes a sequence of actions that represent the primitive painting strokes. In order to ensure that the generated policy is predictable and controllable, we use a constrained learning method and train the painting agent using the environment model and follows the commands encoded in an observation. We have applied our approach on many benchmarks and our results demonstrate that our constrained agent can handle different painting media and different constraints in the action space to collaborate with humans or other agents.

SOLUTION:
We train a natural media painting agent using environment model. Based on our painting agent, we present a novel approach to train a constrained painting agent that follows the command encoded in the observation.