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.
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Question: Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to perform web-based tasks, such as booking flights or replying to emails, where a single mistake can ruin the entire sequence of actions. A common remedy is to "warm-start" the agent by pre-training it to mimic expert demonstrations, but this is prone to overfitting. Instead, we propose to constrain exploration using demonstrations. From each demonstration, we induce high-level "workflows" which constrain the allowable actions at each time step to be similar to those in the demonstration (e.g., "Step 1: click on a textbox; Step 2: enter some text"). Our exploration policy then learns to identify successful workflows and samples actions that satisfy these workflows. Workflows prune out bad exploration directions and accelerate the agent’s ability to discover rewards. We use our approach to train a novel neural policy designed to handle the semi-structured nature of websites, and evaluate on a suite of web tasks, including the recent World of Bits benchmark. We achieve new state-of-the-art results, and show that workflow-guided exploration improves sample efficiency over behavioral cloning by more than 100x.

Answer: We solve the sparse rewards problem on web UI tasks using exploration guided by demonstrations


Question: Recent evidence shows that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are biased towards textures so that CNNs are non-robust to adversarial perturbations over textures, while traditional robust visual features like SIFT (scale-invariant feature transforms) are designed to be robust across a substantial range of affine distortion, addition of noise, etc with the mimic of human perception nature. This paper aims to leverage good properties of SIFT to renovate CNN architectures towards better accuracy and robustness. We borrow the scale-space extreme value idea from SIFT, and propose EVPNet (extreme value preserving network) which contains three novel components to model the extreme values: (1) parametric differences of Gaussian (DoG) to extract extrema, (2) truncated ReLU to suppress non-stable extrema and (3) projected normalization layer (PNL) to mimic PCA-SIFT like feature normalization. Experiments demonstrate that EVPNets can achieve similar or better accuracy than conventional CNNs, while achieving much better robustness on a set of adversarial attacks (FGSM,PGD,etc) even without adversarial training.

Answer: This paper aims to leverage good properties of robust visual features like SIFT to renovate CNN architectures towards better accuracy and robustness.


Question: I show how it can be beneficial to express Metropolis accept/reject decisions in terms of comparison with a uniform [0,1] value, and to then update this uniform value non-reversibly, as part of the Markov chain state, rather than sampling it independently each iteration. This provides a small improvement for random walk Metropolis and Langevin updates in high dimensions.   It produces a larger improvement when using Langevin updates with persistent momentum, giving performance comparable to that of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) with long trajectories.   This is of significance when some variables are updated by other methods, since if HMC is used, these updates can be done only between trajectories, whereas they can be done more often with Langevin updates.   This is seen for a Bayesian neural network model, in which connection weights are updated by persistent Langevin or HMC, while hyperparameters are updated by Gibbs sampling.


Answer:
A non-reversible way of making accept/reject decisions can be beneficial


