PixelSNAIL
Autoregressive generative models consistently achieve the best results in density estimation tasks involving high dimensional data, such as images or audio. They pose density estimation as a sequence modeling task, where a recurrent neural network (RNN) models the conditional distribution over the next element conditioned on all previous elements. In this paradigm, the bottleneck is the extent to which the RNN can model long-range dependencies, and the most successful approaches rely on causal convolutions, which offer better access to earlier parts of the sequence than conventional RNNs. Taking inspiration from recent work in meta reinforcement learning, where dealing with long-range dependencies is also essential, we introduce a new generative model architecture that combines causal convolutions with self attention. In this note, we describe the resulting model and present state-of-the-art log-likelihood results on CIFAR-10 (2.85 bits per dim) and $32 \times 32$ ImageNet (3.80 bits per dim). Our implementation is available at https://…/pixelsnail-public.

Approximate Survey Propagation (ASP)
Approximate message passing algorithm enjoyed considerable attention in the last decade. In this paper we introduce a variant of the AMP algorithm that takes into account glassy nature of the system under consideration. We coin this algorithm as the approximate survey propagation (ASP) and derive it for a class of low-rank matrix estimation problems. We derive the state evolution for the ASP algorithm and prove that it reproduces the one-step replica symmetry breaking (1RSB) fixed-point equations, well-known in physics of disordered systems. Our derivation thus gives a concrete algorithmic meaning to the 1RSB equations that is of independent interest. We characterize the performance of ASP in terms of convergence and mean-squared error as a function of the free Parisi parameter s. We conclude that when there is a model mismatch between the true generative model and the inference model, the performance of AMP rapidly degrades both in terms of MSE and of convergence, while ASP converges in a larger regime and can reach lower errors. Among other results, our analysis leads us to a striking hypothesis that whenever s (or other parameters) can be set in such a way that the Nishimori condition $M=Q>0$ is restored, then the corresponding algorithm is able to reach mean-squared error as low as the Bayes-optimal error obtained when the model and its parameters are known and exactly matched in the inference procedure. …

Reservoir Computing
Reservoir computing is a framework for computation that may be viewed as an extension of neural networks. Typically an input signal is fed into a fixed (random) dynamical system called a reservoir and the dynamics of the reservoir map the input to a higher dimension. Then a simple readout mechanism is trained to read the state of the reservoir and map it to the desired output. The main benefit is that training is performed only at the readout stage and the reservoir is fixed. Liquid-state machines and echo state networks are two major types of reservoir computing.
Reservoir computing approaches for representation and classification of multivariate time series
Rapid Time Series Prediction with a Hardware-Based Reservoir Computer
Recent Advances in Physical Reservoir Computing: A Review