Papers › Explain My Surprise: Learning Efficient Long-Term Memory by Predicting Uncertain Outcomes

Explain My Surprise: Learning Efficient Long-Term Memory by Predicting Uncertain Outcomes

27 Jul 2022arXiv:2207.13649archive 2025-07-28

Artyom Sorokin, Nazar Buzun, Leonid Pugachev, Mikhail Burtsev

In many sequential tasks, a model needs to remember relevant events from the distant past to make correct predictions. Unfortunately, a straightforward application of gradient based training requires intermediate computations to be stored for every element of a sequence. This requires to store prohibitively large intermediate data if a sequence consists of thousands or even millions elements, and as a result, makes learning of very long-term dependencies infeasible. However, the majority of sequence elements can usually be predicted by taking into account only temporally local information. On the other hand, predictions affected by long-term dependencies are sparse and characterized by high uncertainty given only local information. We propose MemUP, a new training method that allows to learn long-term dependencies without backpropagating gradients through the whole sequence at a time. This method can potentially be applied to any recurrent architecture. LSTM network trained with MemUP performs better or comparable to baselines while requiring to store less intermediate data.

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LSTMSigmoid ActivationTanh Activation

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