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: 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.

PROBLEM: Structured tabular data is the most commonly used form of data in industry according to a Kaggle ML and DS Survey. Gradient Boosting Trees, Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression are typically used for classification tasks on tabular data. The recent work of Super Characters method using two-dimensional word embeddings achieved state-of-the-art results in text classification tasks, showcasing the promise of this new approach. In this paper, we propose the SuperTML method, which borrows the idea of Super Characters method and two-dimensional embeddings to address the problem of classification on tabular data. For each input of tabular data, the features are first projected into two-dimensional embeddings like an image, and then this image is fed into fine-tuned ImageNet CNN models for classification. Experimental results have shown that the proposed SuperTML method have achieved state-of-the-art results on both large and small datasets.

SOLUTION: Deep learning on structured tabular data using two-dimensional word embedding with fine-tuned ImageNet pre-trained CNN model.

PROBLEM: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) significantly improve the state-of-the-art for many applications, especially in computer vision. However, CNNs still suffer from a tendency to confidently classify out-distribution samples from unknown classes into pre-defined known classes. Further, they are also vulnerable to adversarial examples. We are relating these two issues through the tendency of CNNs to over-generalize for areas of the input space not covered well by the training set. We show that a CNN augmented with an extra output class can act as a simple yet effective end-to-end model for controlling over-generalization. As an appropriate training set for the extra class, we introduce two resources that are computationally efficient to obtain: a representative natural out-distribution set and interpolated in-distribution samples. To help select a representative natural out-distribution set among available ones, we propose a simple measurement to assess an out-distribution set's fitness. We also demonstrate that training such an augmented CNN with representative out-distribution natural datasets and some interpolated samples allows it to better handle a wide range of unseen out-distribution samples and black-box adversarial examples without training it on any adversaries. Finally, we show that generation of white-box adversarial attacks using our proposed augmented CNN can become harder, as the attack algorithms have to get around the rejection regions when generating actual adversaries.

SOLUTION:
Properly training CNNs with dustbin class increase their robustness to adversarial attacks and their capacity to deal with out-distribution samples.