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Recurrent Highway Networks

2016-07-12ICML 2017Code Available0· sign in to hype

Julian Georg Zilly, Rupesh Kumar Srivastava, Jan Koutník, Jürgen Schmidhuber

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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.

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Benchmark Results

DatasetModelMetricClaimedVerifiedStatus
enwik8Recurrent Highway NetworksBit per Character (BPC)1.27Unverified
Hutter PrizeLarge RHNBit per Character (BPC)1.27Unverified
Hutter PrizeRHN - depth 5 [zilly2016recurrent]Bit per Character (BPC)1.31Unverified
Penn Treebank (Word Level)Recurrent highway networksTest perplexity65.4Unverified
Text8Large RHNBit per Character (BPC)1.27Unverified

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