[SAIF 2019] Day 1: New Perspectives on Generative Adversarial Networks – Simon Lacoste-Julien

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a popular generative modelling approach known for producing appealing samples, but their theoretical properties are not yet fully understood, and they are notably difficult to train. In the first part of this talk, I will provide some insights on why GANs are a more meaningful framework to model high dimensional data like images than the more traditional maximum likelihood approach, interpreting them as “parametric adversarial divergences” and rooting the analysis with statistical decision theory. In the second part of the talk, I will address the difficulty of training GANs from the optimization perspective by importing tools from the mathematical programming literature. I will survey the “variational inequality” framework which contains most formulations of GANs introduced so far, and present theoretical and empirical results on adapting the standard methods (such as the extragradient method) from this literature to the training of GANs.... Read More | Share it now!

[SAIF 2019] Day 1: New Directions in Automatic Text Summarization – Jackie Cheung | Samsung

Automatic text summarization is an important tool for enhancing users’ ability to make decisions in the face of overwhelming amounts of data. Key to making this technology useful and practical is to have high-performing systems that work on a variety of texts and settings. However, existing systems are usually developed and tested on standard research benchmarks based on news texts. In this talk, I discuss how current systems exploit biases in these benchmark tasks in order to perform well without deeply understanding the contents of the input. In particular, they heavily exploit the fact that important sentences tend to appear near the beginning of news articles. I present our lab’s extractive summarization system, BanditSum, which frames summarization as a contextual bandit problem, and our efforts to induce BanditSum to focus on both the position of a sentence and its contents in making content selection decisions, leading to improved summarization performance. Next, I argue that effective summarization requires advances in abstractive summarization, which analyzes the contents of the source texts in order to generate novel summary sentences. However, existing datasets do not require or support the learning of the type of reasoning and generalization which would demonstrate abstraction’s utility. I discuss the ongoing work in my lab in this direction, both from the perspective of analyzing and improving existing abstractive approaches, and from the perspective of developing new datasets and tasks in which abstraction is necessary.... Read More | Share it now!