Methods › Sequential › Recurrent Neural Networks › Neural Turing Machine

Neural Turing Machine

22 papers tagged archive 2025-07-28

Introduced by Alex Graves et al. in Neural Turing Machines

archive 2025-07-28 Description, source and code snippet are the archive's method entry.

A Neural Turing Machine is a working memory neural network model. It couples a neural network architecture with external memory resources. The whole architecture is differentiable end-to-end with gradient descent. The models can infer tasks such as copying, sorting and associative recall.

A Neural Turing Machine (NTM) architecture contains two basic components: a neural network controller and a memory bank. The Figure presents a high-level diagram of the NTM architecture. Like most neural networks, the controller interacts with the external world via input and output vectors. Unlike a standard network, it also interacts with a memory matrix using selective read and write operations. By analogy to the Turing machine we refer to the network outputs that parameterise these operations as “heads.”

Every component of the architecture is differentiable. This is achieved by defining 'blurry' read and write operations that interact to a greater or lesser degree with all the elements in memory (rather than addressing a single element, as in a normal Turing machine or digital computer). The degree of blurriness is determined by an attentional “focus” mechanism that constrains each read and write operation to interact with a small portion of the memory, while ignoring the rest. Because interaction with the memory is highly sparse, the NTM is biased towards storing data without interference. The memory location brought into attentional focus is determined by specialised outputs emitted by the heads. These outputs define a normalised weighting over the rows in the memory matrix (referred to as memory “locations”). Each weighting, one per read or write head, defines the degree to which the head reads or writes at each location. A head can thereby attend sharply to the memory at a single location or weakly to the memory at many locations

PaperSourceSee Code · carpedm20/NTM-tensorflow

Papers archive 2025-07-28

22 shown of 22, newest first. Repository counts are the archive's code-links table. A Syntology line states what Syntology ran from that paper's harvested code; it is per sample and not a correctness claim.

Tasks archive 2025-07-28

20 shown of 32 tasks the archive attaches to papers tagged with this method, by distinct papers. A task without a page in the catalog is plain text.

TaskPapers
Question Answering4
Automatic Speech Recognition2
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)2
BIG-bench Machine Learning2
Decoder2
Information Retrieval2
Machine Translation2
Retrieval2
Speech Recognition2
Translation2
speech-recognition2
Action Detection1
Activity Detection1
Deep Learning1
Dimensionality Reduction1
Face Recognition1
Form1
Image Retrieval1
Intrusion Detection1
Knowledge Graphs1

Usage over time archive 2025-07-28

Papers per year tagged with Neural Turing Machine: 2014 to 2025, peak 4 4 0 2014: 1 paper 2014 2015: 3 papers 2015 2016: 4 papers 2016 2017: 2 papers 2017 2018: 3 papers 2018 2019: 4 papers 2019 2020: 1 paper 2020 2021: 0 papers 2021 2022: 1 paper 2022 2023: 2 papers 2023 2024: 0 papers 2024 2025: 1 paper 2025
Papers per year the archive tags with this method, by the paper's archive date (22 dated). Bars are counts, not a trend claim.

Components: the archive holds no method-to-method composition, so PwC's Components table cannot be rebuilt; the Papers list carries no Results column for the same reason (the archive does not join its leaderboard rows to method tags).

Categories archive 2025-07-28

Recurrent Neural NetworksWorking Memory Models

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