Paper:
Dilated Recurrent Neural Networks
Learning with recurrent neural networks (RNNs) on long sequences is a notoriously difficult task. There are three major challenges: 1) complex dependencies, 2) vanishing and exploding gradients, and 3) efficient parallelization. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective RNN connection structure, the DILATEDRNN, which simultaneously tackles all of these challenges. The proposed architecture is characterized by multi-resolution dilated recurrent skip connections, and can be combined flexibly with diverse RNN cells. Moreover, the DILATEDRNN reduces the number of parameters needed and enhances training efficiency significantly, while matching state-of-the-art performance (even with standard RNN cells) in tasks involving very long-term dependencies. To provide a theory-based quantification of the architecture's advantages, we introduce a memory capacity measure, the mean recurrent length, which is more suitable for RNNs with long skip connections than existing measures. We rigorously prove the advantages of the DILATEDRNN over other recurrent neural architectures. The code for our method is publicly available 1 .

Review:
The paper proposes to build RNNs out of recurrent layers with skip connections of exponentially increasing lenghts, i.e. the recurrent equivalent of stacks of dilated convolutions. Compared to previous work on RNNs with skip connections, the connections to the immediately preceding timestep are fully replaced here, allowing for increased parallelism in the computations. Dilated RNNs are compared against several other recurrent architectures designed to improve learning of long-range temporal correlations, and found to perform comparably or better for some tasks.
The idea is simple and potentially effective, and related work is adequately covered in the introduction, but the evaluation is somewhat flawed. While the idea of using dilated connections in RNNs is clearly inspired by their use in causal CNNs (e.g. WaveNet), the evaluation never includes them. Only several other recurrent architectures are compared against. I think this is especially limiting as the paper claims computational advantages for dilated RNNs, but these computational advantages could be even more outspoken for causal CNNs, which allow for training and certain forms of inference to be fully parallelised across time.
The noisy MNIST task described from L210 onwards (in Section 4.2) seems to be nonstandard and I don't really understand the point. It's nice that dilated RNNs are robust to this type of corruption, but sequences padded with uniform noise seem fairly unlikely to occur in the real world. In Section 4.3, raw audio modelling is found to be less effective than MFCC-based modelling, so this also defeats the point of the dilated RNN a bit. Also, trying dilated RNNs combined with batch normalization would be an interesting additional experiment.
Overall, I don't find the evidence quite as strong as it is claimed to be in the conclusion of the paper.
Remarks:
- Please have the manuscript proofread for spelling and grammar.
- In the introduction, it is stated that RNNs can potentially model infinitely long dependencies, but this is not actually achievable in practice (at least with the types of models that are currently popular). To date, this advantage of RNNs over CNNs is entirely theoretical.
- It is unclear whether dilated RNNs also have repeated stacks of dilation stages, like e.g. WaveNet. If not, this would mean that large-scale features (from layers with large dilation) never feed into fine-scale features (layers with small dilation). That seems like it could be a severe limitation, so this should be clarified.
- Figures 4, 5, 6 are a bit small and hard to read, removing the stars from the curves might make things more clear.
UPDATE: in the author feedback it is stated that the purpose of the paper is to propose an enhancement for RNN models, but since this enhancement is clearly inspired by dilation in CNNs, I don't think this justifies the lack of a comparison to dilated CNNs at all. Ultimately, we want to have models that perform well for some given task -- we do not want to use RNNs just for the sake of it.
That said, the additional experiments that were conducted do address my concerns somewhat (although I wish they had been done on a different task, I still don't really get the point of "noisy MNIST".) So I have raised the score accordingly.