Papers › Recurrent Neural Network Regularization

Recurrent Neural Network Regularization

8 Sep 2014arXiv:1409.2329archive 2025-07-28

Wojciech Zaremba, Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals

We present a simple regularization technique for Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) units. Dropout, the most successful technique for regularizing neural networks, does not work well with RNNs and LSTMs. In this paper, we show how to correctly apply dropout to LSTMs, and show that it substantially reduces overfitting on a variety of tasks. These tasks include language modeling, speech recognition, image caption generation, and machine translation.

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Code

Syntology Ran 2 of 6 code samples harvested from 2 repositories linked to this paper; 4 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 2 ran · our draft was wrong.

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21 repositories listed; official and paper-mentioned ones first.

wojzaremba/lstm officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubApache-2.0 report
FredericGodin/QuasiRNN-DReLU mentioned on GitHub report
Goodideax/lstm-negtive mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
Goodideax/rnn_neg_efficient mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
ahmetumutdurmus/zaremba mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
dhecloud/simple_language_modelling mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
floydhub/word-language-model mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
hikaruya8/lstm_model_py mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
hjc18/language_modeling_lstm mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
isi-nlp/Zoph_RNN mentioned on GitHub report
martin-gorner/tensorflow-rnn-shakespeare mentioned on GitHubtfApache-2.0 report
nbansal90/bAbi_QA mentioned on GitHub report
rgarzonj/LSTMs mentioned on GitHubtf report
shivam13juna/Sequence_Prediction_LSTM_CHAR mentioned on GitHubtfApache-2.0 report
simon-benigeri/lstm-language-model mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
tmatha/lstm mentioned on GitHubtfMIT report
tomsercu/lstm mentioned on GitHubApache-2.0 report
MindSpore-scientific/code-14 mindsporeApache-2.0 report

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6 samples harvested; 2 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 4 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.

2ran · our draft was wrong
4unverified

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minibatch Goodideax/lstm-negtive/ensemble.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · 07d70b54781a432d · report
nll_loss Goodideax/lstm-negtive/ensemble.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · dd2e42e616936d7a · report
create_ptb_loader dhecloud/simple_language_modelling/train_lm.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 773bac171b472d67 · report
eval dhecloud/simple_language_modelling/train_lm.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 463f26abb478a418 · report
perplexity Goodideax/lstm-negtive/ensemble.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · d8b96d7fec1ed277 · report
train dhecloud/simple_language_modelling/train_lm.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · eae89d8a906f77fb · report

Tasks

Caption GenerationImage CaptioningLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingMachine TranslationSpeech RecognitionTranslation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Language Modelling Penn Treebank (Word Level) Zaremba et al. (2014) - LSTM (large) Test perplexity 78.4 #36 of 43 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling Penn Treebank (Word Level) Zaremba et al. (2014) - LSTM (large) Validation perplexity 82.2 #36 of 43 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling Penn Treebank (Word Level) Zaremba et al. (2014) - LSTM (medium) Test perplexity 82.7 #39 of 43 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling Penn Treebank (Word Level) Zaremba et al. (2014) - LSTM (medium) Validation perplexity 86.2 #39 of 43 Archive leaderboard report
Machine Translation WMT2014 English-French Regularized LSTM BLEU score 29.03 #51 of 57 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

Dropout

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