Learning long-term dependencies still remains difficult for recurrent neural networks (RNNs) despite their success in sequence modeling recently. In this paper, we propose a novel gated RNN structure, which contains only one gate. Hidden states in the proposed grouped distributor unit (GDU) are partitioned into groups. For each group, the proportion of memory to be overwritten in each state transition is limited to a constant and is adaptively distributed to each group member. In other word, every separate group has a fixed overall update rate, yet all units are allowed to have different paces. Information is therefore forced to be latched in a flexible way, which helps the model to capture long-term dependencies in data. Besides having a simpler structure, GDU is demonstrated experimentally to outperform LSTM and GRU on tasks including both pathological problems and natural data set.
El Hihi and Bengio first showed that RNNs can learn both long- and short-term dependencies more easily and efficiently if state units are partitioned into groups with different timescales @cite_12 . The clockwork RNN (CW-RNN) @cite_32 implemented this by assigning each state unit a fixed temporal granularity, making state transition happens only at its prescribed clock rate. It can also be seen as a member of cGAST family. More specifically, a UGRNN with a special gate operator @math in which each gate vector value @math is explicitly scheduled to saturate at either @math or @math . CW-RNN does not suffer from gradient conflict for it inherently has the ability to latch information. However, the clock rate schedule should be tuned for each task.
@cite_32 @cite_12
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Sequence prediction and classification are ubiquitous and challenging problems in machine learning that can require identifying complex dependencies between temporally distant inputs. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have the ability, in theory, to cope with these temporal dependencies by virtue of the short-term memory implemented by their recurrent (feedback) connections. However, in practice they are difficult to train successfully when long-term memory is required. This paper introduces a simple, yet powerful modification to the simple RNN (SRN) architecture, the Clockwork RNN (CW-RNN), in which the hidden layer is partitioned into separate modules, each processing inputs at its own temporal granularity, making computations only at its prescribed clock rate. Rather than making the standard RNN models more complex, CW-RNN reduces the number of SRN parameters, improves the performance significantly in the tasks tested, and speeds up the network evaluation. The network is demonstrated in preliminary experiments involving three tasks: audio signal generation, TIMIT spoken word classification, where it outperforms both SRN and LSTM networks, and online handwriting recognition, where it outperforms SRNs. We have already shown that extracting long-term dependencies from sequential data is difficult, both for determimstic dynamical systems such as recurrent networks, and probabilistic models such as hidden Markov models (HMMs) or input output hidden Markov models (IOHMMs). In practice, to avoid this problem, researchers have used domain specific a-priori knowledge to give meaning to the hidden or state variables representing past context. In this paper, we propose to use a more general type of a-priori knowledge, namely that the temporal dependencies are structured hierarchically. This implies that long-term dependencies are represented by variables with a long time scale. This principle is applied to a recurrent network which includes delays and multiple time scales. Experiments confirm the advantages of such structures. A similar approach is proposed for HMMs and IOHMMs.