Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) play a major role in the field of sequential learning, and have outperformed traditional algorithms on many benchmarks. Training deep RNNs still remains a challenge, and most of the state-of-the-art models are structured with a transition depth of 2-4 layers. Recurrent Highway Networks (RHNs) were introduced in order to tackle this issue. These have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a few benchmarks using a depth of 10 layers. However, the performance of this architecture suffers from a bottleneck, and ceases to improve when an attempt is made to add more layers. In this work, we analyze the causes for this, and postulate that the main source is the way that the information flows through time. We introduce a novel and simple variation for the RHN cell, called Highway State Gating (HSG), which allows adding more layers, while continuing to improve performance. By using a gating mechanism for the state, we allow the net to "choose" whether to pass information directly through time, or to gate it. This mechanism also allows the gradient to back-propagate directly through time and, therefore, results in a slightly faster convergence. We use the Penn Treebank (PTB) dataset as a platform for empirical proof of concept. Empirical results show that the improvement due to Highway State Gating is for all depths, and as the depth increases, the improvement also increases.
Gated-Recurrent-Units (GRUs) @cite_1 were suggested in order to reduce the number of parameters of the traditional and commonly used Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) cell (). Similarly to HSG, in GRUs the new state is a weighted sum of the previous state and a non-linear transition of the current input and the previous state. The main difference is that the transition is of a depth of a single layer and, therefore, less robust.
@cite_1
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Recurrent neural networks such as the GRU and LSTM found wide adoption in natural language processing and achieve state-of-the-art results for many tasks. These models are characterized by a memory state that can be written to and read from by applying gated composition operations to the current input and the previous state. However, they only cover a small subset of potentially useful compositions. We propose Multi-Function Recurrent Units (MuFuRUs) that allow for arbitrary differentiable functions as composition operations. Furthermore, MuFuRUs allow for an input- and state-dependent choice of these composition operations that is learned. Our experiments demonstrate that the additional functionality helps in different sequence modeling tasks, including the evaluation of propositional logic formulae, language modeling and sentiment analysis. Sophisticated gated recurrent neural network architectures like LSTMs and GRUs have been shown to be highly effective in a myriad of applications. We develop an un-gated unit, the statistical recurrent unit (SRU), that is able to learn long term dependencies in data by only keeping moving averages of statistics. The SRU's architecture is simple, un-gated, and contains a comparable number of parameters to LSTMs; yet, SRUs perform favorably to more sophisticated LSTM and GRU alternatives, often outperforming one or both in various tasks. We show the efficacy of SRUs as compared to LSTMs and GRUs in an unbiased manner by optimizing respective architectures' hyperparameters for both synthetic and real-world tasks. In this paper we compare different types of recurrent units in recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Especially, we focus on more sophisticated units that implement a gating mechanism, such as a long short-term memory (LSTM) unit and a recently proposed gated recurrent unit (GRU). We evaluate these recurrent units on the tasks of polyphonic music modeling and speech signal modeling. Our experiments revealed that these advanced recurrent units are indeed better than more traditional recurrent units such as tanh units. Also, we found GRU to be comparable to LSTM. Recurrent neural networks with various types of hidden units have been used to solve a diverse range of problems involving sequence data. Two of the most recent proposals, gated recurrent units (GRU) and minimal gated units (MGU), have shown comparable promising results on example public datasets. In this paper, we introduce three model variants of the minimal gated unit (MGU) which further simplify that design by reducing the number of parameters in the forget-gate dynamic equation. These three model variants, referred to simply as MGU1, MGU2, and MGU3, were tested on sequences generated from the MNIST dataset and from the Reuters Newswire Topics (RNT) dataset. The new models have shown similar accuracy to the MGU model while using fewer parameters and thus lowering training expense. One model variant, namely MGU2, performed better than MGU on the datasets considered, and thus may be used as an alternate to MGU or GRU in recurrent neural networks.