Online learning of long-range dependencies

Nicolas Zucchet, Robert Meier, Simon Schug, Asier Mujika, Joao Sacramento

Keywords: online learning, linear recurrent units, temporal credit assignment, biologically-plausible learning, local learning rules, neuromorphic computing

TL;DR: Independent recurrent units enable tractable online learning of long-range dependencies

Abstract: Online learning holds the promise of enabling efficient long-term credit assignment in recurrent neural networks. However, current algorithms fall short of offline backpropagation by either not being scalable or failing to learn long-range dependencies. Here we present a high-performance online learning algorithm that merely doubles the memory and computational requirements of a single inference pass. We achieve this by leveraging independent recurrent modules in multi-layer networks, an architectural motif that has recently been shown to be particularly powerful. Experiments on synthetic memory problems and on the challenging long-range arena benchmark suite reveal that our algorithm performs competitively, establishing a new standard for what can be achieved through online learning. This ability to learn long-range dependencies offers a new perspective on learning in the brain and opens a promising avenue in neuromorphic computing.

Submission Number: 14115