Recurrent Residual Learning for Sequence Classification

Yiren Wang1 and Fei Tian2
1University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2Microsoft Research


Abstract

In this paper, we explore the possibility of leveraging Residual Networks (ResNet), a powerful structure in constructing extremely deep neural network for image understanding, to improve recurrent neural networks (RNN) for modeling sequential data. We show that for sequence classification tasks, incorporating residual connections into recurrent structures yields similar accuracy to Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) RNN with much fewer model parameters. In addition, we propose two novel models which combine the best of both residual learning and LSTM. Experiments show that the new models significantly outperform LSTM.