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Poster
Improving the Gating Mechanism of Recurrent Neural Networks
Albert Gu · Caglar Gulcehre · Thomas Paine · Matthew Hoffman · Razvan Pascanu

Tue Jul 14 07:00 AM -- 07:45 AM & Tue Jul 14 07:00 PM -- 07:45 PM (PDT) @
in Poster Session 1 »

Gating mechanisms are widely used in neural network models, where they allow gradients to backpropagate easily through depth or time. However, their saturation property introduces problems of its own. For example, in recurrent models these gates need to have outputs near 1 to propagate information over long time-delays, which requires them to operate in their saturation regime and hinders gradient-based learning of the gate mechanism. We address this problem by deriving two synergistic modifications to the standard gating mechanism that are easy to implement, introduce no additional hyperparameters, and improve learnability of the gates when they are close to saturation. We show how these changes are related to and improve on alternative recently proposed gating mechanisms such as chrono-initialization and Ordered Neurons. Empirically, our simple gating mechanisms robustly improve the performance of recurrent models on a range of applications, including synthetic memorization tasks, sequential image classification, language modeling, and reinforcement learning, particularly when long-term dependencies are involved.

Keywords: Deep Sequence Models · Time Series and Sequence Models · Sequential, Network, and Time-Series Modeling

Author Information

Albert Gu (Stanford University)
Caglar Gulcehre (DeepMind)
Thomas Paine (DeepMind)
Matthew Hoffman (DeepMind)
Razvan Pascanu (DeepMind)

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