Sequential Recurrent Neural Networks for Language Modeling

Feedforward Neural Network (FNN)-based language models estimate the probability of the next word based on the history of the last N words, whereas Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) perform the same task based only on the last word and some context information that cycles in the network. This paper presents a novel approach, which bridges the gap between these two categories of networks. In particular, we propose an architecture which takes advantage of the explicit, sequential enumeration of the word history in FNN structure while enhancing each word representation at the projection layer through recurrent context information that evolves in the network. The context integration is performed using an additional word-dependent weight matrix that is also learned during the training. Extensive experiments conducted on the Penn Treebank (PTB) and the Large Text Compression Benchmark (LTCB) corpus showed a significant reduction of the perplexity when compared to state-of-the-art feedforward as well as recurrent neural network architectures.Comment: published (INTERSPEECH 2016), 5 pages, 3 figures, 4 table

A Neural Network Approach for Mixing Language Models

The performance of Neural Network (NN)-based language models is steadily improving due to the emergence of new architectures, which are able to learn different natural language characteristics. This paper presents a novel framework, which shows that a significant improvement can be achieved by combining different existing heterogeneous models in a single architecture. This is done through 1) a feature layer, which separately learns different NN-based models and 2) a mixture layer, which merges the resulting model features. In doing so, this architecture benefits from the learning capabilities of each model with no noticeable increase in the number of model parameters or the training time. Extensive experiments conducted on the Penn Treebank (PTB) and the Large Text Compression Benchmark (LTCB) corpus showed a significant reduction of the perplexity when compared to state-of-the-art feedforward as well as recurrent neural network architectures.Comment: Published at IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2017. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1703.0806

Initialization of ReLUs for Dynamical Isometry

Deep learning relies on good initialization schemes and hyperparameter choices prior to training a neural network. Random weight initializations induce random network ensembles, which give rise to the trainability, training speed, and sometimes also generalization ability of an instance. In addition, such ensembles provide theoretical insights into the space of candidate models of which one is selected during training. The results obtained so far rely on mean field approximations that assume infinite layer width and that study average squared signals. We derive the joint signal output distribution exactly, without mean field assumptions, for fully-connected networks with Gaussian weights and biases, and analyze deviations from the mean field results. For rectified linear units, we further discuss limitations of the standard initialization scheme, such as its lack of dynamical isometry, and propose a simple alternative that overcomes these by initial parameter sharing.Comment: NeurIPS 201

TextGAIL: Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning for Text Generation

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for text generation have recently received many criticisms, as they perform worse than their MLE counterparts. We suspect previous text GANs' inferior performance is due to the lack of a reliable guiding signal in their discriminators. To address this problem, we propose a generative adversarial imitation learning framework for text generation that uses large pre-trained language models to provide more reliable reward guidance. Our approach uses contrastive discriminator, and proximal policy optimization (PPO) to stabilize and improve text generation performance. For evaluation, we conduct experiments on a diverse set of unconditional and conditional text generation tasks. Experimental results show that TextGAIL achieves better performance in terms of both quality and diversity than the MLE baseline. We also validate our intuition that TextGAIL's discriminator demonstrates the capability of providing reasonable rewards with an additional task.Comment: AAAI 202