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First published: 2016/07/12 (8 years ago)
Abstract: Many sequential processing tasks require complex nonlinear transition functions from one step to the next. However, recurrent neural networks with such 'deep' transition functions remain difficult to train, even when using Long Short-Term Memory networks. We introduce a novel theoretical analysis of recurrent networks based on Ger\v{s}gorin'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 (RHN), which are long not only in time but also in space, generalizing LSTMs to larger step-to-step depths. Experiments indicate that the proposed architecture results in complex but efficient models, beating previous models for character prediction on the Hutter Prize dataset with less than half of the parameters.