Recurrent Orthogonal Networks and Long-Memory Tasks
Mikael Henaff, Arthur Szlam, Yann LeCun
Abstract
Although RNNs have been shown to be power- ful tools for processing sequential data, finding architectures or optimization strategies that al- low them to model very long term dependencies is still an active area of research. In this work, we carefully analyze two synthetic datasets orig- inally outlined in (Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1997) which are used to evaluate the ability of RNNs to store information over many time steps. We explicitly construct RNN solutions to these problems, and using these constructions, illumi- nate both the problems themselves and the way in which RNNs store different types of information in their hidden states. These constructions fur- thermore explain the success of recent methods that specify unitary initializations or constraints on the transition matrices.
BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v48-henaff16,
title = {Recurrent Orthogonal Networks and Long-Memory Tasks},
author = {Henaff, Mikael and Szlam, Arthur and LeCun, Yann},
booktitle = {Proceedings of The 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {2034--2042},
year = {2016},
editor = {Balcan, Maria Florina and Weinberger, Kilian Q.},
volume = {48},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
address = {New York, New York, USA},
month = {20--22 Jun},
publisher = {PMLR},
pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v48/henaff16.pdf},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v48/henaff16.html},
abstract = {Although RNNs have been shown to be power- ful tools for processing sequential data, finding architectures or optimization strategies that al- low them to model very long term dependencies is still an active area of research. In this work, we carefully analyze two synthetic datasets orig- inally outlined in (Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1997) which are used to evaluate the ability of RNNs to store information over many time steps. We explicitly construct RNN solutions to these problems, and using these constructions, illumi- nate both the problems themselves and the way in which RNNs store different types of information in their hidden states. These constructions fur- thermore explain the success of recent methods that specify unitary initializations or constraints on the transition matrices.}
}