37,110 research outputs found
A three-threshold learning rule approaches the maximal capacity of recurrent neural networks
Understanding the theoretical foundations of how memories are encoded and
retrieved in neural populations is a central challenge in neuroscience. A
popular theoretical scenario for modeling memory function is the attractor
neural network scenario, whose prototype is the Hopfield model. The model has a
poor storage capacity, compared with the capacity achieved with perceptron
learning algorithms. Here, by transforming the perceptron learning rule, we
present an online learning rule for a recurrent neural network that achieves
near-maximal storage capacity without an explicit supervisory error signal,
relying only upon locally accessible information. The fully-connected network
consists of excitatory binary neurons with plastic recurrent connections and
non-plastic inhibitory feedback stabilizing the network dynamics; the memory
patterns are presented online as strong afferent currents, producing a bimodal
distribution for the neuron synaptic inputs. Synapses corresponding to active
inputs are modified as a function of the value of the local fields with respect
to three thresholds. Above the highest threshold, and below the lowest
threshold, no plasticity occurs. In between these two thresholds,
potentiation/depression occurs when the local field is above/below an
intermediate threshold. We simulated and analyzed a network of binary neurons
implementing this rule and measured its storage capacity for different sizes of
the basins of attraction. The storage capacity obtained through numerical
simulations is shown to be close to the value predicted by analytical
calculations. We also measured the dependence of capacity on the strength of
external inputs. Finally, we quantified the statistics of the resulting
synaptic connectivity matrix, and found that both the fraction of zero weight
synapses and the degree of symmetry of the weight matrix increase with the
number of stored patterns.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figures, to be published in PLOS Computational Biolog
Restricted Recurrent Neural Networks
Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and its variations such as Long Short-Term
Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), have become standard building
blocks for learning online data of sequential nature in many research areas,
including natural language processing and speech data analysis. In this paper,
we present a new methodology to significantly reduce the number of parameters
in RNNs while maintaining performance that is comparable or even better than
classical RNNs. The new proposal, referred to as Restricted Recurrent Neural
Network (RRNN), restricts the weight matrices corresponding to the input data
and hidden states at each time step to share a large proportion of parameters.
The new architecture can be regarded as a compression of its classical
counterpart, but it does not require pre-training or sophisticated parameter
fine-tuning, both of which are major issues in most existing compression
techniques. Experiments on natural language modeling show that compared with
its classical counterpart, the restricted recurrent architecture generally
produces comparable results at about 50\% compression rate. In particular, the
Restricted LSTM can outperform classical RNN with even less number of
parameters
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