Recurrent Highway Networks


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Date

2017-08-06

Publication Type

Conference Paper

ETH Bibliography

yes

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Abstract

Many sequential processing tasks require complex nonlinear transition functions from one step to the next. However, recurrent neural networks with “deep” transition functions remain difficult to train, even when using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. We introduce a novel theoretical analysis of recurrent networks based on Gersgorin’s circle theorem that illuminates several modeling and optimization issues and improves our understanding of the LSTM cell. Based on this analysis we propose Recurrent Highway Networks, which extend the LSTM architecture to allow step-to-step transition depths larger than one. Several language modeling experiments demonstrate that the proposed architecture results in powerful and efficient models. On the Penn Treebank corpus, solely increasing the transition depth from 1 to 10 improves word-level perplexity from 90.6 to 65.4 using the same number of parameters. On the larger Wikipedia datasets for character prediction (text8 and enwik8), RHNs outperform all previous results and achieve an entropy of 1.27 bits per character.

Publication status

published

Book title

Proceedings of the 34 th International Conference on Machine Learning

Volume

70

Pages / Article No.

4189 - 4198

Publisher

PMLR

Event

34th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2017)

Edition / version

Methods

Software

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Subject

Organisational unit

09574 - Frazzoli, Emilio / Frazzoli, Emilio check_circle
02130 - Dep. Maschinenbau und Verfahrenstechnik / Dep. of Mechanical and Process Eng.

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