Papers › AntisymmetricRNN: A Dynamical System View on Recurrent Neural Networks
AntisymmetricRNN: A Dynamical System View on Recurrent Neural Networks
Bo Chang, Minmin Chen, Eldad Haber, Ed H. Chi
Recurrent neural networks have gained widespread use in modeling sequential data. Learning long-term dependencies using these models remains difficult though, due to exploding or vanishing gradients. In this paper, we draw connections between recurrent networks and ordinary differential equations. A special form of recurrent networks called the AntisymmetricRNN is proposed under this theoretical framework, which is able to capture long-term dependencies thanks to the stability property of its underlying differential equation. Existing approaches to improving RNN trainability often incur significant computation overhead. In comparison, AntisymmetricRNN achieves the same goal by design. We showcase the advantage of this new architecture through extensive simulations and experiments. AntisymmetricRNN exhibits much more predictable dynamics. It outperforms regular LSTM models on tasks requiring long-term memory and matches the performance on tasks where short-term dependencies dominate despite being much simpler.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sequential Image Classification | noise padded CIFAR-10 | AntisymmetricRNN w/ gating | % Test Accuracy | 54.7 | #6 of 7 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Sequential Image Classification | noise padded CIFAR-10 | LSTM | % Test Accuracy | 11.6 | #7 of 7 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
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