The paper introduces a sequential variational auto-encoder that generates complex images iteratively. The authors also introduce a new spatial attention mechanism that allows the model to focus on small subsets of the image. This new approach for image generation produces images that can’t be distinguished from the training data.

#### What is DRAW:
The deep recurrent attention writer (DRAW) model has two differences with respect to other variational auto-encoders. First, the encoder and the decoder are recurrent networks. Second, it includes an attention mechanism that restricts the input region observed by the encoder and the output region observed by the decoder.

#### What do we gain?
The resulting images are greatly improved by allowing a conditional and sequential generation. In addition, the spatial attention mechanism can be used in other contexts to solve the “Where to look?” problem.

#### What follows?
A possible extension to this model would be to use a convolutional architecture in the encoder or the decoder. Although this might be less useful since we are already restricting the input of the network.

#### Like:
* As observed in the samples generated by the model, the attention mechanism works effectively by reconstructing images in a local way.
* The attention model is fully differentiable.

#### Dislike:
* I think a better exposition of the attention mechanism would improve this paper.

Hosseini and Poovendran propose semantic adversarial examples by randomly manipulating hue and saturation of images. In particular, in an iterative algorithm, hue and saturation are randomly perturbed and projected back to their valid range. If this results in mis-classification the perturbed image is returned as the adversarial example and the algorithm is finished; if not, another iteration is run. The result is shown in Figure 1. As can be seen, the structure of the images is retained while hue and saturation changes, resulting in mis-classified images.

https://i.imgur.com/kFcmlE3.jpg
Figure 1: Examples of the computed semantic adversarial examples.

Also find this summary at [davidstutz.de](https://davidstutz.de/category/reading/).

#### Introduction

* Introduces a new global log-bilinear regression model which combines the benefits of both global matrix factorization and local context window methods.


#### Global Matrix Factorization Methods

* Decompose large matrices into low-rank approximations.
* eg - Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA)

##### Limitations

* Poor performance on word analogy task
* Frequent words contribute disproportionately high to the similarity measure.

#### Shallow, Local Context-Based Window Methods

* Learn word representations using adjacent words.
* eg - Continous bag-of-words (CBOW) model and skip-gram model.

##### Limitations

* Since they do not operate directly on the global co-occurrence counts, they can not utilise the statistics of the corpus effectively.


#### GloVe Model

* To capture the relationship between words $i$ and $j$, word vector models should use ratios of co-occurene probabilites (with other words $k$) instead of using raw probabilites themselves.
* In most general form:
     * $F(w_{i}, w_{j}, w_{k}^{~} ) = P_{ik}/P_{jk}$
* We want $F$ to encode information in the vector space (which have a linear structure), so we can restrict to the difference of $w_{i}$ and $w_{j}$
    * $F(w_{i} - w_{j}, w_{k}^{~} ) = P_{ik}/P_{jk}$
* Since right hand side is a scalar and left hand side is a vector, we take dot product of the arguments.
    * $F( (w_{i} - w_{j})^{T}, w_{k}^{~} ) = P_{ik}/P_{jk}$
* *F* should be invariant to order of the word pair $i$ and $j$.
    * $F(w_{i}^{T}w_{k}^{~}) = P_{ik}$
* Doing further simplifications and optimisations (refer paper), we get cost function, 
    * $J = \sum_{\text{over all i, j pairs in the vocabulary}}[w_{i}^{T}w_{k}^{~} + b_{i} + b_{k}^{~} - log(X_{ik})]^{2}$
    * $f$ is a weighing function.
    * $f(x) = min((x/x_{max})^{\alpha}, 1)$
    * Typical values, $x_{\max} = 100$ and $\alpha = 3/4$
    * *b* are the bias terms.

##### Complexity

* Depends on a number of non-zero elements in the input matrix.
* Upper bound by the square of vocabulary size
* Since for shallow window-based approaches, complexity depends on $|C|$ (size of the corpus), tighter bounds are needed.
* By modelling number of co-occurrences of words as power law function of frequency rank, the complexity can be shown to be proportional to $|C|^{0.8}$

#### Evaluation

##### Tasks

* Word Analogies
    * a is to b as c is to ___?
    * Both semantic and syntactic pairs
    * Find closest d to $w_{b} - w_{c} + w_{a}$ (using cosine similarity)

* Word Similarity
* Named Entity Recognition

##### Datasets

* Wikipedia Dumps - 2010 and 2014
* Gigaword5
* Combination of Gigaword5 and Wikipedia2014
* CommonCrawl
* 400,000 most frequent words considered from the corpus.

##### Hyperparameters

* Size of context window.
* Whether to distinguish left context from right context.
* $f$ - Word pairs that are $d$ words apart contribute $1/d$ to the total count.
* $xmax = 100$
* $\alpha = 3/4$
* AdaGrad update

##### Models Compared With

* Singular Value Decomposition
* Continous Bag-Of-Words
* Skip-Gram

##### Results

* Glove outperforms all other models significantly.
* Diminishing returns for vectors larger than 200 dimensions.
* Small and asymmetric context windows (context window only to the left) works better for syntactic tasks.
* Long and symmetric context windows (context window to both the sides) works better for semantic tasks.
* Syntactic task benefited from larger corpus though semantic task performed better with Wikipedia instead of Gigaword5 probably due to the comprehensiveness of Wikipedia and slightly outdated nature of Gigaword5.
* Word2vec’s performance decreases if the number of negative samples increases beyond about 10.
* For the same corpus, vocabulary, and window size GloVe consistently achieves better results, faster.

### Introduction

* *Curriculum Learning*  - When training machine learning models, start with easier subtasks and gradually increase the difficulty level of the tasks.
* Motivation comes from the observation that humans and animals seem to learn better when trained with a curriculum like a strategy.
* [Link](http://ronan.collobert.com/pub/matos/2009_curriculum_icml.pdf) to the paper.

### Contributions of the paper

* Explore cases that show that curriculum learning benefits machine learning.
* Offer hypothesis around when and why does it happen.
* Explore relation of curriculum learning with other machine learning approaches.

### Experiments with convex criteria

* Training perceptron where some input data is irrelevant(not predictive of the target class).
* Difficulty can be defined in terms of the number of irrelevant samples or margin from the separating hyperplane.
* Curriculum learning model outperforms no-curriculum based approach.
* Surprisingly, in the case of difficulty defined in terms of the number of irrelevant examples, the anti-curriculum strategy also outperforms no-curriculum strategy.

### Experiments on shape recognition with datasets having different variability in shapes

* Standard(target) dataset - Images of rectangles, ellipses, and triangles.
* Easy dataset - Images of squares, circles, and equilateral triangles.
* Start performing gradient descent on easy dataset and switch to target data set at a particular epoch (called *switch epoch*). 
* For no-curriculum learning, the first epoch is the *switch epoch*.
* As *switch epoch* increases, the classification error comes down with the best performance when *switch epoch* is half the total number of epochs.
* Paper does not report results for higher values of *switch epoch*.

### Experiments on language modeling

* Standard data set is the set of all possible windows of the text of size 5 from Wikipedia where all words in the window appear in 20000 most frequent words.
* Easy dataset considers only those windows where all words appear in 5000 most frequent words in vocabulary.
* Each word from the vocabulary is embedded into a *d* dimensional feature space using a matrix **W** (to be learnt).
* The model predicts the score of next word, given a window of words.
* Expected value of ranking loss function is minimized to learn **W**.
* Curriculum Learning-based model overtakes the other model soon after switching to the target vocabulary, indicating that curriculum-based model quickly learns new words.

### Curriculum as a continuation method

* Continuation methods start with a smoothed objective function and gradually move to less smoothed function.
* Useful in the case where the objective function in non-convex.
* Consider a family of cost functions $C_\lambda (\theta)$ such that  $C_0(\theta)$ can be easily optimized and $C_1(\theta)$ is the actual objective function.
* Start with $C_0 (\theta)$ and increase $\lambda$, keeping $\theta$ at a local minimum of $C_\lambda (\theta)$.
* Idea is to move $\theta$ towards a dominant (if not global) minima of $C_1(\theta)$.
* Curriculum learning can be seen as a sequence of training criteria starting with an easy-to-optimise objective and moving all the way to the actual objective.
* The paper provides a mathematical formulation of curriculum learning in terms of a target training distribution and a weight function (to model the probability of selecting anyone training example at any step).

### Advantages of Curriculum Learning

* Faster training in the online setting as learner does not try to learn difficult examples when it is not ready.
* Guiding training towards better local minima in parameter space, specifically useful for non-convex methods.

### Relation to other machine learning approaches

* **Unsupervised preprocessing** - Both have a regularizing effect and lower the generalization error for the same training error.
* **Active learning** - The learner would benefit most from the examples that are close to the learner's frontier of knowledge and are neither too hard nor too easy.
* **Boosting Algorithms** - Difficult examples are gradually emphasised though the curriculum starts with a focus on easier examples and the training criteria do not change.
* **Transfer learning** and **Life-long learning** - Initial tasks are used to guide the optimisation problem.

### Criticism

* Curriculum Learning is not well understood, making it difficult to define the curriculum.
* In one of the examples, anti-curriculum performs better than no-curriculum. Given that curriculum learning is modeled on the idea that learning benefits when examples are presented in order of increasing difficulty, one would expect anti-curriculum to perform worse.

Cover's Universal Portfolio is an information-theoretic portfolio optimization algorithm that utilizes constantly rebalanced porfolios (CRP). A CRP is one in which the distribution of wealth among stocks in the portfolio remains the same from period to period. Universal Portfolio strictly performs rebalancing based on historical pricing, making no assumptions about the underlying distribution of the prices. 

The wealth achieved by a CRP over n periods is:

$S_n(b,x^n) = \displaystyle  \prod_{n}^{i=1} b \cdot x$

The key takeaway:

Where $\mathrm{b}$ is the allocation vector. Cover takes the integral of the wealth over the entire portfolio to give $b_{t+1}$. This is what makes it "universal". Most implementations in practice do this discretely, by creating a matrix $\mathrm{B}$ with each row containing a combination of the percentage allocatio, and calculating $\mathrm{S} = \mathrm{B\dot x}$.

Cover mentions trading costs will eat away most of the gains, especially if this algorithm is allowed to rebalance daily. Nowadays, there are commission-free brokers. See this summary for Universal Portfolios without transaction costs: \cite{conf/colt/BlumK97}