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Title: RNNs with Private and Shared Representations for Semi-Supervised Sequence Learning

Paper content:
Training recurrent neural networks (RNNs) on long sequences using backpropagation through time (BPTT) remains a fundamental challenge.
It has been shown that adding a local unsupervised loss term into the optimization objective makes the training of RNNs on long sequences more effective.
While the importance of an unsupervised task can in principle be controlled by a coefficient in the objective function, the gradients with respect to the unsupervised loss term still influence all the hidden state dimensions, which might cause important information about the supervised task to be degraded or erased.
Compared to existing semi-supervised sequence learning methods, this paper focuses upon a traditionally overlooked mechanism -- an architecture with explicitly designed private and shared hidden units designed to mitigate the detrimental influence of the auxiliary unsupervised loss over the main supervised task.
We achieve this by dividing RNN hidden space into a private space for the supervised task and a shared space for both the supervised and unsupervised tasks.
We present extensive experiments with the proposed framework on several long sequence modeling benchmark datasets.
Results indicate that the proposed framework can yield performance gains in RNN models where long term dependencies are notoriously challenging to deal with.
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are widely considered the de facto tool for modeling sequences with a deep learning approach.
Training RNNs usually relies on the use of backpropagation through time (BPTT).
It is well known that unfortunately, it becomes difficult for BPTT to transmit gradients through very long computational graphs, as gradients tend to explode or vanish BID6 .
FIG0 -(a
) gives an example in an oversimplified setting, where the hidden state at the first time-step does not receive gradients. To
make the BPTT-based training more effective, architectures such as the long short-term memory (LSTM) BID5 ) RNN and gated recurrent unit (GRU) BID2 ) RNNs, use parameterized gates which can make gradient flow more effective over long sequences.Recently, strong evidence in BID14 suggests that simultaneously learning supervised and unsupervised tasks can also enhance an RNN's ability to capture long-term dependencies. By
injecting unsupervised tasks locally along the sequence the unsupervised tasks can be harnessed to provide local and reliable gradients to more effectively optimize RNNs for long sequence learning tasks. Recent
work using this strategy BID10 BID4 BID14 , could be characterized as employing semi-supervised learning architectures consisting of two distinct types of RNNs, one for the primary supervised task and another for the auxiliary unsupervised tasks which are injected locally along the sequence. More concretely
, the RNN for an unsupervised task updates is instantiated periodically along the sequence and its hidden states are reinitialized occasionally; whereas, the RNN for the supervised tasks operates at every time-step. FIG0 -(b) shows
how gradients
flow in this architecture.Despite the ability of these new semi-supervised architectures to mitigate the problem of long-distance BPTT, these approaches risk impairing the training of the main task by contaminating the entire representation-space with the unsupervised loss gradients.The challenge we address here is how to properly coordinate supervised and unsupervised tasks. Common wisdom for semi-supervised
learning BID10 typically follows one of the two procedures discussed below. The first widely used approach is
to weight supervised and unsupervised loss functions with varying coefficients empirically. However this method cannot radically
address aforementioned problem since representations for supervised and unsupervised learning are still entangled in same space. It is true that the contribution of
the unsupervised task can in principle be controlled by a coefficient in the objective function, but the gradients with respect to the unsupervised loss term still influence all the hidden state dimensions, which might cause important information about the supervised task to be erased accidentally. The second approach coordinates these
two types of learning by specifying a training order and separating them into different learning phases. For example, these approaches usually
first pre-train a model under unsupervised setting, then use the model for supervised learning BID11 .While these methods can provide rich auxiliary
knowledge which are potentially useful for the main task, there is no guarantee that this asynchronous learning fashion could let the main task utilize the auxiliary information well, and therefore long-term dependencies are still difficult to capture. It is thus crucial to ask: how exactly can auxiliary
unsupervised tasks best serve the main supervised learning task for long-term dependencies learning?On the other hand, it has been demonstrated that dividing
an RNN's representational space into different groups is useful for modeling long-term dependencies. One such example is clockwork RNNs BID7 , where each group
is responsible for a subset of hidden states and each processes input at different clock speeds. It is also possible to let each layer represent a group, and
each group may run at different time scales BID12 BID3 .With the above analysis in mind, we propose to solve the long-term
dependency problem by enabling the two RNNs to have a shared feature space for both supervised and unsupervised tasks, and allowing an RNN to have a private space dedicated for the supervised task. The key insight is to associate different time-scale updating operations
of distinct RNNs with different representational spaces. Through the shared feature space, the RNNs form an interface to exchange
features useful for both of them with less inference. As a side-product, the proposed variant of RNNs trains and evaluates slightly
faster since the architecture by design introduced an inductive bias that the modules for auxiliary tasks should have less parameters. FIG0 -(c) shows how the gradients flow through the hidden states during the backward
pass of
BPTT for the proposed architecture. It is clear that the lower (blue) space is not allowed to receive gradients from the unsupervised
task.Our primary contribution is introducing a private-and-shared feature space architecture for semisupervised sequential learning tasks, which is motivated through the lens of gradient flows. While the modification is simple, its application on modeling long-term dependencies has shown significant
improvement over other state-of-the-art algorithms to our knowledge, and thus we believe it will be of broad interest to the community. In Section 3, we describe the proposed method. In section 4, we present the experiments. In section 5, we
give an analysis of our method and experiments.2
RELATED WORK BID1 show that a generic temporal
convolutional network (TCN) outperforms some RNN variants on several
benchmark datasets. However, compared with TCNs, RNNs require lower memory for inference and can handle potential parameter change for
a transfer of domain BID1 . Furthermore, BID14 show that RNNs with an auxiliary unsupervised loss still outperform TCNs in terms of accuracy on
long sequence learning tasks. More importantly, RNNs can model, in principle, infinitely long dependencies with a finite number of parameters.Unsupervised
learning is often introduced in a pre-training fashion. For example, BID11 show that for natural language understanding tasks, generative pre-training of a language model on a large
amount of unlabeled text followed by discriminative fine-tuning leads to significant improvement. As another example, in BID10 , after pretraining the model with unlabeled data, the authors fix the weights and add additional
task-specific model capacity, making it possible to leverage large, rich and universal representations for the downstream tasks. It should be noted that BID10 utilizes additional datasets, whereas we do not. BID14 propose RNN-AE (AutoEncoder) to form an auxiliary
unsupervised task to aid RNNs in handling long sequencse, i.e. r-RNN (reconstruction
) and p-RNN (prediction). The r-RNN approach tries to reconstruct the original input from the internal representation. Skim-RNN BID13 ) dynamically decides to update
only a small fraction of the hidden state for relatively unimportant input tokens. A skim-RNN
contains multiple RNNs that have a shared space and also have private spaces on which they operate. However a skim-RNN only considers
supervised tasks and aims at accelerating the inference speed. In contrast, our method is specifically designed
for long sequence learning problems with an unsupervised loss. Furthermore, a skim-RNN only uses
one RNN at each time-step which is determined by a reinforcement learning agent, whereas ours always use multiple
RNNs. As a side-effect of not relying on reinforcement learning algorithms, our method is easier to train in practice.The hidden state of our proposed RNN
also has multiple subsets, but they run at the same clock speed. Even more importantly, we introduce an inductive bias that different hidden sub-spaces should be responsible for different tasks.
In this paper, we have presented a semi-supervised RNN architecture with explicitly designed private and shared hidden representations.
This architecture allows information transfer between the supervised and unsupervised tasks in a hitherto unexplored way.
Compared with other similar semi-supervised RNN techniques, our experiments on widely used and competitive benchmark data sets suggest that our formulation indeed yields performance gains.
We conjecture that these gains come from the desirable properties of both gradient and information flow in architectures with shared and private representations.
As a side-product, our proposed architecture trains and evaluates faster than the related alternatives that we have explored since the architecture introduces an inductive bias that the modules for auxiliary tasks should have fewer parameters.

assistant: text: This paper focuses upon a traditionally overlooked mechanism -- an architecture with explicitly designed private and shared hidden units designed to mitigate the detrimental influence of the auxiliary unsupervised loss over the main supervised task.