problem

Definition

When a title says "the X problem," it usually points to a difficulty the field has recognized and named — the saddle point problem, the credit assignment problem, the alignment problem — rather than to one concrete benchmark. It is worth separating from "task": a task is something you evaluate on, while a problem is the structural obstacle that makes a whole family of tasks hard.

Explainers using this term

• Convexity and Optimization — Why Deep Learning Works Even Though It Isn't ConvexIdentifying and attacking the saddle point problem in high-dimensional non-convex optimization