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: Recurrent neural networks are known for their notorious exploding and vanishing gradient problem (EVGP). This problem becomes more evident in tasks where the information needed to correctly solve them exist over long time scales, because EVGP prevents important gradient components from being back-propagated adequately over a large number of steps. We introduce a simple stochastic algorithm ( extit{h}-detach) that is specific to LSTM optimization and targeted towards addressing this problem. Specifically, we show that when the LSTM weights are large, the gradient components through the linear path (cell state) in the LSTM computational graph get suppressed. Based on the hypothesis that these components carry information about long term dependencies (which we show empirically), their suppression can prevent LSTMs from capturing them. Our algorithm
ootnote{Our code is available at https://github.com/bhargav104/h-detach. } prevents gradients flowing through this path from getting suppressed, thus allowing the LSTM to capture such dependencies better. We show significant improvements over vanilla LSTM gradient based training in terms of convergence speed, robustness to seed and learning rate, and generalization using our modification of LSTM gradient on various benchmark datasets.

SOLUTION: A simple algorithm to improve optimization and handling of long term dependencies in LSTM

PROBLEM: Robust estimation under Huber's $\epsilon$-contamination model has become an important topic in statistics and theoretical computer science. Rate-optimal procedures such as Tukey's median and other estimators based on statistical depth functions are impractical because of their computational intractability. In this paper, we establish an intriguing connection between f-GANs and various depth functions through the lens of f-Learning. Similar to the derivation of f-GAN, we show that these depth functions that lead to rate-optimal robust estimators can all be viewed as variational lower bounds of the total variation distance in the framework of f-Learning. This connection opens the door of computing robust estimators using tools developed for training GANs. In particular, we show that a JS-GAN that uses a neural network discriminator with at least one hidden layer is able to achieve the minimax rate of robust mean estimation under Huber's $\epsilon$-contamination model. Interestingly, the hidden layers of the neural net structure in the discriminator class are shown to be necessary for robust estimation.

SOLUTION: GANs are shown to provide us a new effective robust mean estimate against agnostic contaminations with both statistical optimality and practical tractability.

PROBLEM: Data Interpretation is an important part of Quantitative Aptitude exams and requires an individual to answer questions grounded in plots such as bar charts, line graphs, scatter plots, extit{etc}. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in building models which can perform this task by learning from datasets containing triplets of the form \{plot, question, answer\}. Two such datasets have been proposed in the recent past which contain plots generated from synthetic data with limited (i) $x-y$ axes variables (ii) question templates and (iii) answer vocabulary and hence do not adequately capture the challenges posed by this task. To overcome these limitations of existing datasets, we introduce a new dataset containing $9.7$ million question-answer pairs grounded over $270,000$ plots with three main differentiators. First, the plots in our dataset contain a wide variety of realistic $x$-$y$ variables such as CO2 emission, fertility rate, extit{etc. } extracted from real word data sources such as World Bank, government sites, extit{etc}. Second, the questions in our dataset are more complex as they are based on templates extracted from interesting questions asked by a crowd of workers using a fraction of these plots. Lastly, the answers in our dataset are not restricted to a small vocabulary and a large fraction of the answers seen at test time are not present in the training vocabulary. As a result, existing models for Visual Question Answering which largely use end-to-end models in a multi-class classification framework cannot be used for this task. We establish initial results on this dataset and emphasize the complexity of the task using a multi-staged modular pipeline with various sub-components to (i) extract relevant data from the plot and convert it to a semi-structured table (ii) combine the question with this table and use compositional semantic parsing to arrive at a logical form from which the answer can be derived. We believe that such a modular framework is the best way to go forward as it would enable the research community to independently make progress on all the sub-tasks involved in plot question answering.

SOLUTION:
We created a new dataset for data interpretation over plots and also propose a baseline for the same.