Abstract Recurrent neural networks have proved to be an effective method for statistical language modeling. However, in practice their memory and run-time complexity are usually too large to be implemented in real-time offline mobile applications. In this paper we consider several compression techniques for recurrent neural networks including Long–Short Term Memory models. We make particular attention to the high-dimensional output problem caused by the very large vocabulary size. We focus on effective compression methods in the context of their exploitation on devices: pruning, quantization, and matrix decomposition approaches (low-rank factorization and tensor train decomposition, in particular). For each model we investigate the trade-off between its size, suitability for fast inference and perplexity. We propose a general pipeline for applying the most suitable methods to compress recurrent neural networks for language modeling. It has been shown in the experimental study with the Penn Treebank (PTB) dataset that the most efficient results in terms of speed and compression–perplexity balance are obtained by matrix decomposition techniques.
The pruning with the variational dropout technique was applied to compression of RNNs in natural language processing tasks @cite_49 @cite_31 . However, the results in language modeling @cite_49 are significantly worth in terms of achieved perplexity when compared even with classical results of @cite_51 . Moreover, the acute problem with high-dimensional output is completely ignored.
@cite_31 @cite_51 @cite_49
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Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) stand at the forefront of many recent developments in deep learning. Yet a major difficulty with these models is their tendency to overfit, with dropout shown to fail when applied to recurrent layers. Recent results at the intersection of Bayesian modelling and deep learning offer a Bayesian interpretation of common deep learning techniques such as dropout. This grounding of dropout in approximate Bayesian inference suggests an extension of the theoretical results, offering insights into the use of dropout with RNN models. We apply this new variational inference based dropout technique in LSTM and GRU models, assessing it on language modelling and sentiment analysis tasks. The new approach outperforms existing techniques, and to the best of our knowledge improves on the single model state-of-the-art in language modelling with the Penn Treebank (73.4 test perplexity). This extends our arsenal of variational tools in deep learning. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) stand at the forefront of many recent developments in deep learning. Yet a major difficulty with these models is their tendency to overfit, with dropout shown to fail when applied to recurrent layers. Recent results at the intersection of Bayesian modelling and deep learning offer a Bayesian interpretation of common deep learning techniques such as dropout. This grounding of dropout in approximate Bayesian inference suggests an extension of the theoretical results, offering insights into the use of dropout with RNN models. We apply this new variational inference based dropout technique in LSTM and GRU models, assessing it on language modelling and sentiment analysis tasks. The new approach outperforms existing techniques, and to the best of our knowledge improves on the single model state-of-the-art in language modelling with the Penn Treebank (73.4 test perplexity). This extends our arsenal of variational tools in deep learning. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performances in many natural language processing tasks, such as language modeling and machine translation. However, when the vocabulary is large, the RNN model will become very big (e.g., possibly beyond the memory capacity of a GPU device) and its training will become very inefficient. In this work, we propose a novel technique to tackle this challenge. The key idea is to use 2-Component (2C) shared embedding for word representations. We allocate every word in the vocabulary into a table, each row of which is associated with a vector, and each column associated with another vector. Depending on its position in the table, a word is jointly represented by two components: a row vector and a column vector. Since the words in the same row share the row vector and the words in the same column share the column vector, we only need @math vectors to represent a vocabulary of @math unique words, which are far less than the @math vectors required by existing approaches. Based on the 2-Component shared embedding, we design a new RNN algorithm and evaluate it using the language modeling task on several benchmark datasets. The results show that our algorithm significantly reduces the model size and speeds up the training process, without sacrifice of accuracy (it achieves similar, if not better, perplexity as compared to state-of-the-art language models). Remarkably, on the One-Billion-Word benchmark Dataset, our algorithm achieves comparable perplexity to previous language models, whilst reducing the model size by a factor of 40-100, and speeding up the training process by a factor of 2. We name our proposed algorithm to reflect its very small model size and very high training speed. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a very recent technique to model long range dependencies in natural languages. They have clearly outperformed trigrams and other more advanced language modeling techniques by using non-linearly modeling long range dependencies. An alternative is to use log-linear interpolation of skip models (i.e. skip bigrams and skip trigrams). The method as such has been published earlier. In this paper we investigate the impact of different smoothing techniques on the skip models as a measure of their overall performance. One option is to use automatically trained distance clusters (both hard and soft) to increase robustness and to combat sparseness in the skip model. We also investigate alternative smoothing techniques on word level. For skip bigrams when skipping a small number of words Kneser-Ney smoothing (KN) is advantageous. For a larger number of words being skipped Dirichlet smoothing performs better. In order to exploit the advantages of both KN and Dirichlet smoothing we propose a new unified smoothing technique. Experiments are performed on four Babel languages: Cantonese, Pashto, Tagalog and Turkish. RNNs and log-linearly interpolated skip models are on par if the skip models are trained with standard smoothing techniques. Using the improved smoothing of the skip models along with distance clusters, we can clearly outperform RNNs by about 8-11 in perplexity across all four languages.