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arXiv:1409.3215cs.CL

Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks

Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc V. Le

Abstract

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are powerful models that have achieved excellent performance on difficult learning tasks. Although DNNs work well whenever large labeled training sets are available, they cannot be used to map sequences to sequences. In this paper, we present a general end-to-end approach to sequence learning that makes minimal assumptions on the sequence structure. Our method uses a multilayered Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to map the input sequence to a vector of a fixed dimensionality, and then another deep LSTM to decode the target sequence from the vector. Our main result is that on an English to French translation task from the WMT'14 dataset, the translations produced by the LSTM achieve a BLEU score of 34.8 on the entire test set, where the LSTM's BLEU score was penalized on out-of-vocabulary words. Additionally, the LSTM did not have difficulty on long sentences. For comparison, a phrase-based SMT system achieves a BLEU score of 33.3 on the same dataset. When we used the LSTM to rerank the 1000 hypotheses produced by the aforementioned SMT system, its BLEU score increases to 36.5, which is close to the previous best result on this task. The LSTM also learned sensible phrase and sentence representations that are sensitive to word order and are relatively invariant to the active and the passive voice. Finally, we found that reversing the order of the words in all source sentences (but not target sentences) improved the LSTM's performance markedly, because doing so introduced many short term dependencies between the source and the target sentence which made the optimization problem easier.

arXiv comments
9 pages
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.CLComputation and Language cs.LGMachine Learning

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Linked by 8 identifiable commenters in 9 comments across 9 threads, from Jan 2015 to Apr 2025.

Comments linking this paper, per year.

Discussed in comments9 threads

  1. The Leaderboard Illusion 1 comment
    • > Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. In context of genetic programming and other non-traditional ML techniques, I've been having difficulty attempting to locate a simple fitness function that reliably…

      bob1029View on HNParent context

    • OpenAI was most certainly not the first organization to develop (or distribute) an LLM model: https://github.com/google-research/bert https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805 Failing that, Seq2seq predates OpenAI's incorporation: https://google.github.io/seq2seq/…

      smoldesuView on HNParent context

  2. What are embeddings? 1 comment
    • This is basically how RNN encoder/decoder architectures worked. The encoder encoded the input as a single vector and the decoder would decode this into text (eg. for machine translation) [1]. However, fixed-length vectors generally required too much 'compression' to represent…

      microtonalView on HNParent context

    • I think it was with the seq2seq paper of Sutskever, Vinyals and Le in 2014: https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.3215 People were doing a mix of learning from data and hand engineered solutions before this, but this was the first system learned end-to-end, afaik.

      std_badallocView on HNParent context

  3. Understanding word vectors 1 comment
    • Combining word embeddings to get a single representation of a sentence in general is a pretty hard problem. Point-wise averaging, addition or summation [0] works alright, but it's not great. Some more recent work looks a using RNNs to combine them; most of the literature I've…

      aglionbyView on HNParent context

  4. When not to use deep learning 1 comment
    • Geoff Hinton refers to thought vectors performing reasoning by analogy using algebra [1] in his Royal Society Lecture. The other widely reported vector algebras in a semantic space were discovered by Mikolov et al when producing ~300 dimensional vectors for a billion word…

      deepnetView on HNParent context

  5. My path to OpenAI 1 comment
    • no it wouldn't and it doesn't. Either you would have to strip it down too much to fit on a phone, so it would lose performance (and it's far from state-of-the-art anyway, being an example) or it would not fit on your phone, unless you removed everything else from it (and even…

      nlView on HNParent context

    • This work indicates that language translation is vector addition on a lower dimensional semantic manifold that neural networks converge on, derived from the high dimensional whole vocabulary context vectors of the input. It is extended by : Sequence to Sequence Learning with…

      deepnetView on HNParent context

    • New neural machine translation architectures are experimenting with pairs of neural encoders / decoders, one pair for each language and a shared language independent vector space for the meaning of all words: http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.1078 http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.3215…

      ogriselView on HNParent context

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