Input-output equivalence of unitary and contractive RNNs

Melikasadat Emami, Mojtaba Sahraee-Ardakan, Sundeep Rangan, Alyson K. Fletcher

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

Abstract

Unitary recurrent neural networks (URNNs) have been proposed as a method to overcome the vanishing and exploding gradient problem in modeling data with long-term dependencies. A basic question is how restrictive is the unitary constraint on the possible input-output mappings of such a network? This work shows that for any contractive RNN with ReLU activations, there is a URNN with at most twice the number of hidden states and the identical input-output mapping. Hence, with ReLU activations, URNNs are as expressive as general RNNs. In contrast, for certain smooth activations, it is shown that the input-output mapping of an RNN cannot be matched with a URNN, even with an arbitrary number of states. The theoretical results are supported by experiments on modeling of slowly-varying dynamical systems.

Original languageEnglish (US)
JournalAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Volume32
StatePublished - 2019
Event33rd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2019 - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: Dec 8 2019Dec 14 2019

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Signal Processing

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