Papers › Exploring the Limits of Language Modeling
Exploring the Limits of Language Modeling
Rafal Jozefowicz, Oriol Vinyals, Mike Schuster, Noam Shazeer, Yonghui Wu
In this work we explore recent advances in Recurrent Neural Networks for large scale Language Modeling, a task central to language understanding. We extend current models to deal with two key challenges present in this task: corpora and vocabulary sizes, and complex, long term structure of language. We perform an exhaustive study on techniques such as character Convolutional Neural Networks or Long-Short Term Memory, on the One Billion Word Benchmark. Our best single model significantly improves state-of-the-art perplexity from 51.3 down to 30.0 (whilst reducing the number of parameters by a factor of 20), while an ensemble of models sets a new record by improving perplexity from 41.0 down to 23.7. We also release these models for the NLP and ML community to study and improve upon.
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Code
Syntology Ran 2 of 8 code samples harvested from 2 repositories linked to this paper; 6 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 2 ran · our draft was wrong.
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Code Syntology ran Syntology
8 samples harvested; 2 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 6 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Language Modelling | One Billion Word | 10 LSTM+CNN inputs + SNM10-SKIP (ensemble) | Number of params | 43B | #10 of 27 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | One Billion Word | 10 LSTM+CNN inputs + SNM10-SKIP (ensemble) | PPL | 23.7 | #10 of 27 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | One Billion Word | LSTM-8192-1024 + CNN Input | Number of params | 1.04B | #18 of 27 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | One Billion Word | LSTM-8192-1024 + CNN Input | PPL | 30.0 | #18 of 27 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | One Billion Word | LSTM-8192-1024 | Number of params | 1.8B | #19 of 27 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | One Billion Word | LSTM-8192-1024 | PPL | 30.6 | #19 of 27 | 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.
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