The pre-dominant approach to language modeling to date is based on recurrent neural networks. Their success on this task is often linked to their ability to capture unbounded context. In this paper we develop a finite context approach through stacked convolutions, which can be more efficient since they allow parallelization over sequential tokens. We propose a novel simplified gating mechanism that outperforms Oord et al. (2016b) and investigate the impact of key architectural decisions. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art on the WikiText-103 benchmark, even though it features longterm dependencies, as well as competitive results on the Google Billion Words benchmark. Our model reduces the latency to score a sentence by an order of magnitude compared to a recurrent baseline. To our knowledge, this is the first time a non-recurrent approach is competitive with strong recurrent models on these large scale language tasks.

The prevalent approach to sequence to sequence learning maps an input sequence to a variable length output sequence via recurrent neural networks. We introduce an architecture based entirely on convolutional neural networks. 1 Compared to recurrent models, computations over all elements can be fully parallelized during training to better exploit the GPU hardware and optimization is easier since the number of non-linearities is fixed and independent of the input length. Our use of gated linear units eases gradient propagation and we equip each decoder layer with a separate attention module. We outperform the accuracy of the deep LSTM setup of Wu et al. (2016) on both WMT'14 English-German and WMT'14 English-French translation at an order of magnitude faster speed, both on GPU and CPU.

我们介绍了块状变压器，该变压器以序列的反复方式应用变压器层，并且相对于序列长度具有线性复杂性。我们的复发单元在训练过程中在代币的块而不是单个令牌上运行，并利用块内并行计算，以便有效利用加速器硬件。单元本身非常简单。它仅仅是一个变压器层：它使用自我注意事项和交叉注意力来有效计算大量状态向量和令牌上的复发函数。我们的设计部分受到LSTM单元的启发，它使用LSTM风格的大门，但它可以将典型的LSTM单元缩放为几个数量级。我们的复发实现在计算时间和参数计数中都具有相同的成本作为传统的变压器层，但是在很长的序列中，语言建模任务中的语言建模任务的困惑极大地改善了。我们的模型比远程变压器XL基线的表现宽大，同时运行的速度是两倍。我们证明了它在PG19（书籍），Arxiv论文和GitHub源代码上的有效性。我们的代码已发布为开​​源。

Recent neural network sequence models with softmax classifiers have achieved their best language modeling performance only with very large hidden states and large vocabularies. Even then they struggle to predict rare or unseen words even if the context makes the prediction unambiguous. We introduce the pointer sentinel mixture architecture for neural sequence models which has the ability to either reproduce a word from the recent context or produce a word from a standard softmax classifier. Our pointer sentinel-LSTM model achieves state of the art language modeling performance on the Penn Treebank (70.9 perplexity) while using far fewer parameters than a standard softmax LSTM. In order to evaluate how well language models can exploit longer contexts and deal with more realistic vocabularies and larger corpora we also introduce the freely available WikiText corpus. 1

状态空间模型已显示在建模远距离依赖性方面有效，特别是序列分类任务。在这项工作中，我们着重于对英语书籍，GitHub源代码和Arxiv数学文章的自回旋序列建模。基于围绕封闭激活功能的有效性的最新发展，我们提出了一个名为“封闭状态空间（GSS）”的新层，并表明它的训练速度明显快于TPU的S4（即DSS）的对角线版本，具有相当竞争力 - 基于变压器的基线，并表现出零击向更长的输入，同时直接实施。最后，我们表明，利用自我意见来建模局部依赖性，可以进一步提高GSS的性能。

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is an end-to-end learning approach for automated translation, with the potential to overcome many of the weaknesses of conventional phrase-based translation systems. Unfortunately, NMT systems are known to be computationally expensive both in training and in translation inference -sometimes prohibitively so in the case of very large data sets and large models. Several authors have also charged that NMT systems lack robustness, particularly when input sentences contain rare words. These issues have hindered NMT's use in practical deployments and services, where both accuracy and speed are essential. In this work, we present GNMT, Google's Neural Machine Translation system, which attempts to address many of these issues. Our model consists of a deep LSTM network with 8 encoder and 8 decoder layers using residual connections as well as attention connections from the decoder network to the encoder. To improve parallelism and therefore decrease training time, our attention mechanism connects the bottom layer of the decoder to the top layer of the encoder. To accelerate the final translation speed, we employ low-precision arithmetic during inference computations. To improve handling of rare words, we divide words into a limited set of common sub-word units ("wordpieces") for both input and output. This method provides a good balance between the flexibility of "character"-delimited models and the efficiency of "word"-delimited models, naturally handles translation of rare words, and ultimately improves the overall accuracy of the system. Our beam search technique employs a length-normalization procedure and uses a coverage penalty, which encourages generation of an output sentence that is most likely to cover all the words in the source sentence. To directly optimize the translation BLEU scores, we consider refining the models by using reinforcement learning, but we found that the improvement in the BLEU scores did not reflect in the human evaluation. On the WMT'14 English-to-French and English-to-German benchmarks, GNMT achieves competitive results to state-of-the-art. Using a human side-by-side evaluation on a set of isolated simple sentences, it reduces translation errors by an average of 60% compared to Google's phrase-based production system.

We propose two novel model architectures for computing continuous vector representations of words from very large data sets. The quality of these representations is measured in a word similarity task, and the results are compared to the previously best performing techniques based on different types of neural networks. We observe large improvements in accuracy at much lower computational cost, i.e. it takes less than a day to learn high quality word vectors from a 1.6 billion words data set. Furthermore, we show that these vectors provide state-of-the-art performance on our test set for measuring syntactic and semantic word similarities.

We introduce a neural network with a recurrent attention model over a possibly large external memory. The architecture is a form of Memory Network [23] but unlike the model in that work, it is trained end-to-end, and hence requires significantly less supervision during training, making it more generally applicable in realistic settings. It can also be seen as an extension of RNNsearch [2] to the case where multiple computational steps (hops) are performed per output symbol. The flexibility of the model allows us to apply it to tasks as diverse as (synthetic) question answering [22] and to language modeling. For the former our approach is competitive with Memory Networks, but with less supervision. For the latter, on the Penn TreeBank and Text8 datasets our approach demonstrates comparable performance to RNNs and LSTMs. In both cases we show that the key concept of multiple computational hops yields improved results.

Models based on deep convolutional networks have dominated recent image interpretation tasks; we investigate whether models which are also recurrent, or "temporally deep", are effective for tasks involving sequences, visual and otherwise. We develop a novel recurrent convolutional architecture suitable for large-scale visual learning which is end-to-end trainable, and demonstrate the value of these models on benchmark video recognition tasks, image description and retrieval problems, and video narration challenges. In contrast to current models which assume a fixed spatio-temporal receptive field or simple temporal averaging for sequential processing, recurrent convolutional models are "doubly deep" in that they can be compositional in spatial and temporal "layers". Such models may have advantages when target concepts are complex and/or training data are limited. Learning long-term dependencies is possible when nonlinearities are incorporated into the network state updates. Long-term RNN models are appealing in that they directly can map variable-length inputs (e.g., video frames) to variable length outputs (e.g., natural language text) and can model complex temporal dynamics; yet they can be optimized with backpropagation. Our recurrent long-term models are directly connected to modern visual convnet models and can be jointly trained to simultaneously learn temporal dynamics and convolutional perceptual representations. Our results show such models have distinct advantages over state-of-the-art models for recognition or generation which are separately defined and/or optimized.

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.

Recurrent neural networks (RNN) are the backbone of many text and speech applications. These architectures are typically made up of several computationally complex components such as; non-linear activation functions, normalization, bi-directional dependence and attention. In order to maintain good accuracy, these components are frequently run using full-precision floating-point computation, making them slow, inefficient and difficult to deploy on edge devices. In addition, the complex nature of these operations makes them challenging to quantize using standard quantization methods without a significant performance drop. We present a quantization-aware training method for obtaining a highly accurate integer-only recurrent neural network (iRNN). Our approach supports layer normalization, attention, and an adaptive piecewise linear (PWL) approximation of activation functions, to serve a wide range of state-of-the-art RNNs. The proposed method enables RNN-based language models to run on edge devices with $2\times$ improvement in runtime, and $4\times$ reduction in model size while maintaining similar accuracy as its full-precision counterpart.

在本文中，我们试图通过引入深度学习模型的句法归纳偏见来建立两所学校之间的联系。我们提出了两个归纳偏见的家族，一个家庭用于选区结构，另一个用于依赖性结构。选区归纳偏见鼓励深度学习模型使用不同的单位（或神经元）分别处理长期和短期信息。这种分离为深度学习模型提供了一种方法，可以从顺序输入中构建潜在的层次表示形式，即更高级别的表示由高级表示形式组成，并且可以分解为一系列低级表示。例如，在不了解地面实际结构的情况下，我们提出的模型学会通过根据其句法结构组成变量和运算符的表示来处理逻辑表达。另一方面，依赖归纳偏置鼓励模型在输入序列中找到实体之间的潜在关系。对于自然语言，潜在关系通常被建模为一个定向依赖图，其中一个单词恰好具有一个父节点和零或几个孩子的节点。将此约束应用于类似变压器的模型之后，我们发现该模型能够诱导接近人类专家注释的有向图，并且在不同任务上也优于标准变压器模型。我们认为，这些实验结果为深度学习模型的未来发展展示了一个有趣的选择。

In this paper, we propose a novel neural network model called RNN Encoder-Decoder that consists of two recurrent neural networks (RNN). One RNN encodes a sequence of symbols into a fixedlength vector representation, and the other decodes the representation into another sequence of symbols. The encoder and decoder of the proposed model are jointly trained to maximize the conditional probability of a target sequence given a source sequence. The performance of a statistical machine translation system is empirically found to improve by using the conditional probabilities of phrase pairs computed by the RNN Encoder-Decoder as an additional feature in the existing log-linear model. Qualitatively, we show that the proposed model learns a semantically and syntactically meaningful representation of linguistic phrases.

The recently introduced continuous Skip-gram model is an efficient method for learning high-quality distributed vector representations that capture a large number of precise syntactic and semantic word relationships. In this paper we present several extensions that improve both the quality of the vectors and the training speed. By subsampling of the frequent words we obtain significant speedup and also learn more regular word representations. We also describe a simple alternative to the hierarchical softmax called negative sampling. An inherent limitation of word representations is their indifference to word order and their inability to represent idiomatic phrases. For example, the meanings of "Canada" and "Air" cannot be easily combined to obtain "Air Canada". Motivated by this example, we present a simple method for finding phrases in text, and show that learning good vector representations for millions of phrases is possible.

We explore story generation: creative systems that can build coherent and fluent passages of text about a topic. We collect a large dataset of 300K human-written stories paired with writing prompts from an online forum. Our dataset enables hierarchical story generation, where the model first generates a premise, and then transforms it into a passage of text. We gain further improvements with a novel form of model fusion that improves the relevance of the story to the prompt, and adding a new gated multi-scale self-attention mechanism to model long-range context. Experiments show large improvements over strong baselines on both automated and human evaluations. Human judges prefer stories generated by our approach to those from a strong non-hierarchical model by a factor of two to one.

We introduce a new type of deep contextualized word representation that models both (1) complex characteristics of word use (e.g., syntax and semantics), and (2) how these uses vary across linguistic contexts (i.e., to model polysemy). Our word vectors are learned functions of the internal states of a deep bidirectional language model (biLM), which is pretrained on a large text corpus. We show that these representations can be easily added to existing models and significantly improve the state of the art across six challenging NLP problems, including question answering, textual entailment and sentiment analysis. We also present an analysis showing that exposing the deep internals of the pre-trained network is crucial, allowing downstream models to mix different types of semi-supervision signals.

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) sequentially process data by updating their state with each new data point, and have long been the de facto choice for sequence modeling tasks. However, their inherently sequential computation makes them slow to train. Feed-forward and convolutional architectures have recently been shown to achieve superior results on some sequence modeling tasks such as machine translation, with the added advantage that they concurrently process all inputs in the sequence, leading to easy parallelization and faster training times. Despite these successes, however, popular feed-forward sequence models like the Transformer fail to generalize in many simple tasks that recurrent models handle with ease, e.g. copying strings or even simple logical inference when the string or formula lengths exceed those observed at training time. We propose the Universal Transformer (UT), a parallel-in-time self-attentive recurrent sequence model which can be cast as a generalization of the Transformer model and which addresses these issues. UTs combine the parallelizability and global receptive field of feed-forward sequence models like the Transformer with the recurrent inductive bias of RNNs. We also add a dynamic per-position halting mechanism and find that it improves accuracy on several tasks. In contrast to the standard Transformer, under certain assumptions UTs can be shown to be Turing-complete. Our experiments show that UTs outperform standard Transformers on a wide range of algorithmic and language understanding tasks, including the challenging LAMBADA language modeling task where UTs achieve a new state of the art, and machine translation where UTs achieve a 0.9 BLEU improvement over Transformers on the WMT14 En-De dataset. * Equal contribution, alphabetically by last name. † Work performed while at Google Brain.

近年来，基于变压器的预训练模型已获得了很大的进步，成为自然语言处理中最重要的骨干之一。最近的工作表明，变压器内部的注意力机制可能不需要，卷积神经网络和基于多层感知器的模型也已被研究为变压器替代方案。在本文中，我们考虑了一个用于语言模型预训练的图形循环网络，该网络通过本地令牌级通信为每个序列构建一个图形结构，以及与其他代币解耦的句子级表示。原始模型在受监督培训下的特定领域特定文本分类中表现良好，但是，其通过自我监督的方式学习转移知识的潜力尚未得到充分利用。我们通过优化体系结构并验证其在更通用的语言理解任务（英语和中文）中的有效性来填补这一空白。至于模型效率，我们的模型在基于变压器的模型中而不是二次复杂性，而是具有线性复杂性，并且在推断过程中的性能更有效。此外，我们发现与现有基于注意力的模型相比，我们的模型可以生成更多样化的输出，而背景化的功能冗余性较小。

We present two approaches to use unlabeled data to improve Sequence Learning with recurrent networks. The first approach is to predict what comes next in a sequence, which is a language model in NLP. The second approach is to use a sequence autoencoder, which reads the input sequence into a vector and predicts the input sequence again. These two algorithms can be used as a "pretraining" algorithm for a later supervised sequence learning algorithm. In other words, the parameters obtained from the pretraining step can then be used as a starting point for other supervised training models. In our experiments, we find that long short term memory recurrent networks after pretrained with the two approaches become more stable to train and generalize better. With pretraining, we were able to achieve strong performance in many classification tasks, such as text classification with IMDB, DBpedia or image recognition in CIFAR-10.

现实世界中的数据是高维的：即使在压缩后，书籍，图像或音乐表演也很容易包含数十万个元素。但是，最常用的自回归模型，变压器非常昂贵，以缩放捕获这种远程结构所需的输入和层数。我们开发了感知者AR，这是一种自回归的模态 - 不合骨架构，它使用交叉注意力将远程输入映射到少数潜在的潜在，同时还可以维护端到端的因果关系掩盖。感知器AR可以直接进行十万个令牌，从而实现了实用的长篇小写密度估计，而无需手工制作的稀疏模式或记忆机制。当对图像或音乐进行培训时，感知器AR会生成具有清晰长期连贯性和结构的输出。我们的架构还获得了长期基准测试的最新可能性，包括64 x 64个Imagenet图像和PG-19书籍。