Minimum Description Length Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Nur Lan, Emmanuel Chemla, Roni Katzir
Keywords: recurrent neural network, neural network, language modeling, minimum description length, genetic algorithm, semantics, syntax
Abstract: Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) face two well-known challenges: (a) the difficulty of such networks to generalize appropriately as opposed to memorizing, especially from very short input sequences (generalization); and (b) the difficulty for us to understand the knowledge that the network has attained (transparency). We explore the implications to these challenges of employing a general search through neural architectures using a genetic algorithm with Minimum Description Length (MDL) as an objective function. We find that MDL leads the networks to reach adequate levels of generalization from very small corpora, improving over backpropagation-based alternatives. We demonstrate this approach by evolving networks which perform tasks of increasing complexity with absolute correctness. The resulting networks are small, easily interpretable, and unlike classical RNNs, are provably appropriate for sequences of arbitrary length even when trained on very limited corpora. One case study is addition, for which our system grows a network with just four cells, reaching 100% accuracy (and at least .999 certainty) for arbitrary large numbers.