Abstract: Ongoing innovations in recurrent neural network architectures have provided a steady influx of apparently state-of-the-art results on language modelling benchmarks. However, these have been evaluated using differing code bases and limited computational resources, which represent uncontrolled sources of experimental variation. We reevaluate several popular architectures and regularisation methods with large-scale automatic black-box hyperparameter tuning and arrive at the somewhat surprising conclusion that standard LSTM architectures, when properly regularised, outperform more recent models. We establish a new state of the art on the Penn Treebank and Wikitext-2 corpora, as well as strong baselines on the Hutter Prize dataset.

Introduction: The scientific process by which the deep learning research community operates is guided by empirical studies that evaluate the relative quality of models. Complicating matters, the measured performance of a model depends not only on its architecture (and data), but it can strongly depend on hyperparameter values that affect learning, regularisation, and capacity. This hyperparameter dependence is an often inadequately controlled source of variation in experiments, which creates a risk that empirically unsound claims will be reported. In this paper, we use a black-box hyperparameter optimisation technique to control for hyperparameter effects while comparing the relative performance of language modelling architectures based on LSTMs, Recurrent Highway Networks BIBREF0 and NAS BIBREF1 . We specify flexible, parameterised model families with the ability to adjust embedding and recurrent cell sizes for a given parameter budget and with fine grain control over regularisation and learning hyperparameters. Once hyperparameters have been properly controlled for, we find that LSTMs outperform the more recent models, contra the published claims. Our result is therefore a demonstration that replication failures can happen due to poorly controlled hyperparameter variation, and this paper joins other recent papers in warning of the under-acknowledged existence of replication failure in deep learning BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 . However, we do show that careful controls are possible, albeit at considerable computational cost. Several remarks can be made in light of these results. First, as (conditional) language models serve as the central building block of many tasks, including machine translation, there is little reason to expect that the problem of unreliable evaluation is unique to the tasks discussed here. However, in machine translation, carefully controlling for hyperparameter effects would be substantially more expensive because standard datasets are much larger. Second, the research community should strive for more consensus about appropriate experimental methodology that balances costs of careful experimentation with the risks associated with false claims. Finally, more attention should be paid to hyperparameter sensitivity. Models that introduce many new hyperparameters or which perform well only in narrow ranges of hyperparameter settings should be identified as such as part of standard publication practice.

Question: what architectures were reevaluated?
Answer: LSTM, RHN and NAS.