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: In recent years we have seen fast progress on a number of benchmark problems in AI, with modern methods achieving near or super human performance in Go, Poker and Dota. One common aspect of all of these challenges is that they are by design adversarial or, technically speaking, zero-sum. In contrast to these settings, success in the real world commonly requires humans to collaborate and communicate with others, in settings that are, at least partially, cooperative. In the last year, the card game Hanabi has been established as a new benchmark environment for AI to fill this gap. In particular, Hanabi is interesting to humans since it is entirely focused on theory of mind, i.e. the ability to effectively reason over the intentions, beliefs and point of view of other agents when observing their actions. Learning to be informative when observed by others is an interesting challenge for Reinforcement Learning (RL): Fundamentally, RL requires agents to explore in order to discover good policies. However, when done naively, this randomness will inherently make their actions less informative to others during training. We present a new deep multi-agent RL method, the Simplified Action Decoder (SAD), which resolves this contradiction exploiting the centralized training phase. During training SAD allows other agents to not only observe the (exploratory) action chosen, but agents instead also observe the greedy action of their team mates. By combining this simple intuition with an auxiliary task for state prediction and best practices for multi-agent learning, SAD establishes a new state of the art for 2-5 players on the self-play part of the Hanabi challenge.

SOLUTION: We develop Simplified Action Decoder, a simple MARL algorithm that beats previous SOTA on Hanabi by a big margin across 2- to 5-player games.

PROBLEM: Extreme Classification Methods have become of paramount importance, particularly for Information Retrieval (IR) problems, owing to the development of smart algorithms that are scalable to industry challenges. One of the prime class of models that aim to solve the memory and speed challenge of extreme multi-label learning is Group Testing. Multi-label Group Testing (MLGT) methods construct label groups by grouping original labels either randomly or based on some similarity and then train smaller classifiers to first predict the groups and then recover the original label vectors. Recently, a novel approach called MACH (Merged Average Classifiers via Hashing) was proposed which projects the huge label vectors to a small and manageable count-min sketch (CMS) matrix and then learns to predict this matrix to recover the original prediction probabilities. Thereby, the model memory scales O(logK) for K classes. MACH is a simple algorithm which works exceptionally well in practice. Despite this simplicity of MACH, there is a big gap between the theoretical understanding of the trade-offs with MACH. In this paper we fill this gap. Leveraging the theory of count-min sketch we provide precise quantification of the memory-identifiablity tradeoffs. We extend the theory to the case of multi-label classification, where the dependencies make the estimators hard to calculate in closed forms. To mitigate this issue, we propose novel quadratic approximation using the Inclusion-Exclusion Principle. Our estimator has significantly lower reconstruction error than the typical CMS estimator across various values of number of classes K, label sparsity and compression ratio.

SOLUTION: How to estimate original probability vector for millions of classes from count-min sketch measurements -  a theoretical and practical setup.

PROBLEM: Despite their impressive performance, deep neural networks exhibit striking failures on out-of-distribution inputs. One core idea of adversarial example research is to reveal neural network errors under such distribution shifts. We decompose these errors into two complementary sources: sensitivity and invariance. We show deep networks are not only too sensitive to task-irrelevant changes of their input, as is well-known from epsilon-adversarial examples, but are also too invariant to a wide range of task-relevant changes, thus making vast regions in input space vulnerable to adversarial attacks. We show such excessive invariance occurs across various tasks and architecture types. On MNIST and ImageNet one can manipulate the class-specific content of almost any image without changing the hidden activations. We identify an insufficiency of the standard cross-entropy loss as a reason for these failures. Further, we extend this objective based on an information-theoretic analysis so it encourages the model to consider all task-dependent features in its decision. This provides the first approach tailored explicitly to overcome excessive invariance and resulting vulnerabilities.

SOLUTION:
We show deep networks are not only too sensitive to task-irrelevant changes of their input, but also too invariant to a wide range of task-relevant changes, thus making vast regions in input space vulnerable to adversarial attacks.

