We introduce the Attentive Unsupervised Text (W)riter (AUTR), which is a word level generative model for natural language. It uses a recurrent neural network with a dynamic attention and canvas memory mechanism to iteratively construct sentences. By viewing the state of the memory at intermediate stages and where the model is placing its attention, we gain insight into how it constructs sentences. We demonstrate that AUTR learns a meaningful latent representation for each sentence, and achieves competitive log-likelihood lower bounds whilst being computationally efficient. It is effective at generating and reconstructing sentences, as well as imputing missing words.
This paper introduces the Deep Recurrent Attentive Writer (DRAW) neural network architecture for image generation. DRAW networks combine a novel spatial attention mechanism that mimics the foveation of the human eye, with a sequential variational auto-encoding framework that allows for the iterative construction of complex images. The system substantially improves on the state of the art for generative models on MNIST, and, when trained on the Street View House Numbers dataset, it generates images that cannot be distinguished from real data with the naked eye.