At present, the vast majority of building blocks, techniques, and architectures for deep learning are based on real-valued operations and representations. However, recent work on recurrent neural networks and older fundamental theoretical analysis suggests that complex numbers could have a richer representational capacity and could also facilitate noise-robust memory retrieval mechanisms. Despite their attractive properties and potential for opening up entirely new neural architectures, complex-valued deep neural networks have been marginalized due to the absence of the building blocks required to design such models. In this work, we provide the key atomic components for complex-valued deep neural networks and apply them to convolutional feed-forward networks and convolutional LSTMs. More precisely, we rely on complex convolutions and present algorithms for complex batch-normalization, complex weight initialization strategies for complex-valued neural nets and we use them in experiments with end-to-end training schemes. We demonstrate that such complex-valued models are competitive with their real-valued counterparts. We test deep complex models on several computer vision tasks, on music transcription using the MusicNet dataset and on Speech Spectrum Prediction using the TIMIT dataset. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on these audio-related tasks.
Using complex parameters has numerous advantages from computational, biological, and signal processing perspectives. From a computational point of view, @cite_0 has shown that Holographic Reduced Representations , which use complex numbers, are numerically efficient and stable in the context of information retrieval from an associative memory. insert key-value pairs in the associative memory by addition into a . Although not typically viewed as such, residual networks and Highway Networks have a similar architecture to associative memories: each ResNet residual path computes a residual that is then inserted -- by summing into the memory'' provided by the identity connection. Given residual networks' resounding success on several benchmarks and their functional similarity to associative memories, it seems interesting to marry both together. This motivates us to incorporate complex weights and activations in residual networks. Together, they offer a mechanism by which useful information may be retrieved, processed and inserted in each residual block.
@cite_0
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We investigate a new method to augment recurrent neural networks with extra memory without increasing the number of network parameters. The system has an associative memory based on complex-valued vectors and is closely related to Holographic Reduced Representations and Long Short-Term Memory networks. Holographic Reduced Representations have limited capacity: as they store more information, each retrieval becomes noisier due to interference. Our system in contrast creates redundant copies of stored information, which enables retrieval with reduced noise. Experiments demonstrate faster learning on multiple memorization tasks.