Papers › An Analysis of Neural Language Modeling at Multiple Scales

An Analysis of Neural Language Modeling at Multiple Scales

22 Mar 2018arXiv:1803.08240archive 2025-07-28

Stephen Merity, Nitish Shirish Keskar, Richard Socher

Many of the leading approaches in language modeling introduce novel, complex and specialized architectures. We take existing state-of-the-art word level language models based on LSTMs and QRNNs and extend them to both larger vocabularies as well as character-level granularity. When properly tuned, LSTMs and QRNNs achieve state-of-the-art results on character-level (Penn Treebank, enwik8) and word-level (WikiText-103) datasets, respectively. Results are obtained in only 12 hours (WikiText-103) to 2 days (enwik8) using a single modern GPU.

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salesforce/awd-lstm-lm officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchBSD-3-Clause report
AtheMathmo/lookahead-lstm mentioned on GitHubpytorchBSD-3-Clause report
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ari-holtzman/genlm mentioned on GitHubpytorchBSD-3-Clause report
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2ran · honoured contract
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batchify ari-holtzman/genlm/utils.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted BSD-3-Clause (permissive) · 1f32d831b2c4c04b · report
one_hot AtheMathmo/lookahead-lstm/pointer.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract fingerprinted BSD-3-Clause (permissive) · d38f82da04a3f93e · report
repackage_hidden SachinIchake/KALM/utils.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract fingerprinted BSD-3-Clause (permissive) · 4372bb4533fd1936 · report
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dot_distance philippwirth/treelangrnn/distance.py community (archive-listed) unverified BSD-3-Clause (permissive) · 98a55feeff35dab9 · report
embedded_dropout AtheMathmo/lookahead-lstm/embed_regularize.py community (archive-listed) unverified BSD-3-Clause (permissive) · 62d148258bdd054f · report
eucl_distance philippwirth/treelangrnn/distance.py community (archive-listed) unverified BSD-3-Clause (permissive) · 89727c8d9972d138 · report
get_batch SachinIchake/KALM/utils.py community (archive-listed) unverified BSD-3-Clause (permissive) · 6f3c8e0b36d76af7 · report
hb_atanh philippwirth/treelangrnn/hb_helpers.py community (archive-listed) unverified BSD-3-Clause (permissive) · bf412beb331b029b · report
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Tasks

Language ModelingLanguage Modelling

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Language Modelling Hutter Prize 3-layer AWD-LSTM Bit per Character (BPC) 1.232 #13 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling Hutter Prize 3-layer AWD-LSTM Number of params 47M #13 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling Penn Treebank (Character Level) 3-layer AWD-LSTM Bit per Character (BPC) 1.175 #7 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling Penn Treebank (Character Level) 3-layer AWD-LSTM Number of params 13.8M #7 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling Penn Treebank (Character Level) 6-layer QRNN Bit per Character (BPC) 1.187 #9 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling Penn Treebank (Character Level) 6-layer QRNN Number of params 13.8M #9 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling WikiText-103 4 layer QRNN Number of params 151M #75 of 89 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling WikiText-103 4 layer QRNN Test perplexity 33.0 #75 of 89 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling WikiText-103 4 layer QRNN Validation perplexity 32.0 #75 of 89 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling enwik8 AWD-LSTM (3 layers) Bit per Character (BPC) 1.232 #33 of 42 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling enwik8 AWD-LSTM (3 layers) Number of params 47M #33 of 42 Archive leaderboard report

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