Recurrent Batch Normalization

30 Mar 2016  ·  Tim Cooijmans, Nicolas Ballas, César Laurent, Çağlar Gülçehre, Aaron Courville ·

We propose a reparameterization of LSTM that brings the benefits of batch normalization to recurrent neural networks. Whereas previous works only apply batch normalization to the input-to-hidden transformation of RNNs, we demonstrate that it is both possible and beneficial to batch-normalize the hidden-to-hidden transition, thereby reducing internal covariate shift between time steps. We evaluate our proposal on various sequential problems such as sequence classification, language modeling and question answering. Our empirical results show that our batch-normalized LSTM consistently leads to faster convergence and improved generalization.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Sequential Image Classification Sequential MNIST BN LSTM Unpermuted Accuracy 99% # 16
Permuted Accuracy 95.4% # 22
Language Modelling Text8 BN LSTM Bit per Character (BPC) 1.36 # 20
Number of params 16M # 17

Methods