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arXiv:1506.02078cs.LG

Visualizing and Understanding Recurrent Networks

Andrej Karpathy, Justin Johnson, Li Fei-Fei

Abstract

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and specifically a variant with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), are enjoying renewed interest as a result of successful applications in a wide range of machine learning problems that involve sequential data. However, while LSTMs provide exceptional results in practice, the source of their performance and their limitations remain rather poorly understood. Using character-level language models as an interpretable testbed, we aim to bridge this gap by providing an analysis of their representations, predictions and error types. In particular, our experiments reveal the existence of interpretable cells that keep track of long-range dependencies such as line lengths, quotes and brackets. Moreover, our comparative analysis with finite horizon n-gram models traces the source of the LSTM improvements to long-range structural dependencies. Finally, we provide analysis of the remaining errors and suggests areas for further study.

arXiv comments
changing style, adding references, minor changes to text
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.LGMachine Learning cs.CLComputation and Language cs.NENeural and Evolutionary Computing

On Hacker News

Linked by 4 identifiable commenters in 4 comments across 4 threads, from Jul 2017 to Feb 2024. Found in 2 HN submissions from Jun 2015 to Jan 2016. Open submission discussions.

Comments linking this paper, per year.

Discussed in comments4 threads

    • I tried to find the where I heard that Radford was inspired by that blog post, but the closest thing I found is that in the "Sentiment Neuron" paper (Learning to Generate Reviews and Discovering Sentiment: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.01444.pdf), in the "Discussion and Future…

      magoghmView on HNParent context

    • Yikes, you are right… I just linked a private repo. '^^ I have poked the rest of the group and it seems that at least a tweet was made [1] – but not much else remains. Describing it from memory, we ran ELMo and BERT on Wikipedia and then allowed similarity search between a query…

      ninjinView on HNParent context

    • This one is a character level language model. The Microsoft one is per token. This one should be the closest to the Microsoft model: https://miltos.allamanis.com/publicationfiles/allamanis2018l... Btw, simple neural networks are far from doing the best for code. The kind of…

      veselinView on HNParent context

    • So, this is definitely good work, and I don't have any suggestions on how to do it better, but I'm ultimately not sure how useful I find it. I have no intuition for what the histograms for `t` should look like, and so seeing the different histograms for ծ vs `not ծ` doesn't tell…

      fnbrView on HNParent context

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