Papers › Hierarchical Multiscale Recurrent Neural Networks

Hierarchical Multiscale Recurrent Neural Networks

6 Sep 2016arXiv:1609.01704archive 2025-07-28

Junyoung Chung, Sungjin Ahn, Yoshua Bengio

Learning both hierarchical and temporal representation has been among the long-standing challenges of recurrent neural networks. Multiscale recurrent neural networks have been considered as a promising approach to resolve this issue, yet there has been a lack of empirical evidence showing that this type of models can actually capture the temporal dependencies by discovering the latent hierarchical structure of the sequence. In this paper, we propose a novel multiscale approach, called the hierarchical multiscale recurrent neural networks, which can capture the latent hierarchical structure in the sequence by encoding the temporal dependencies with different timescales using a novel update mechanism. We show some evidence that our proposed multiscale architecture can discover underlying hierarchical structure in the sequences without using explicit boundary information. We evaluate our proposed model on character-level language modelling and handwriting sequence modelling.

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Code

bolducp/hierarchical-rnn mentioned on GitHubtf report
kaiu85/hm-rnn mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
nikolasthuesen/HMLSTM mentioned on GitHub report

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Language Modelling

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Language Modelling Text8 LayerNorm HM-LSTM Bit per Character (BPC) 1.29 #19 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling Text8 LayerNorm HM-LSTM Number of params 35M #19 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling enwik8 LN HM-LSTM Bit per Character (BPC) 1.32 #38 of 42 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling enwik8 LN HM-LSTM Number of params 35M #38 of 42 Archive leaderboard report

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