{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/training-recurrent-neural-networks-via-1","title":"Training Recurrent Neural Networks via Forward Propagation Through Time","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-07-18","proceeding":"International Conference on Machine Learning 2021 7","authors":["Anil Kag","Venkatesh Saligrama"],"abstract":"Back-propagation through time (BPTT) has been widely used for training Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). BPTT updates RNN parameters on an instance by back-propagating the error in time over the entire sequence length, and as a result, leads to poor trainability due to the well-known gradient explosion/decay phenomena. While a number of prior works have proposed to mitigate vanishing/explosion effect through careful RNN architecture design, these RNN variants still train with BPTT. We propose a novel forward-propagation algorithm, FPTT, where at each time, for an instance, we update RNN parameters by optimizing an instantaneous risk function. Our proposed risk is a regularization penalty at time t  that evolves dynamically based on previously observed losses, and allows for RNN parameter updates to converge to a stationary solution of the empirical RNN objective. We consider both sequence-to-sequence as well as terminal loss problems. Empirically FPTT outperforms BPTT on a number of well-known benchmark tasks, thus enabling architectures like LSTMs to solve long range dependencies problems.","url_abs":"https://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/kag21a.html","url_pdf":"http://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/kag21a/kag21a.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"training-recurrent-neural-networks-via-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/anilkagak2/FPTT","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}