Long short-term memory with activation on gradient

Abstract

As the number of long short-term memory (LSTM) layers increases, vanishing/exploding gradient problems exacerbate and have a negative impact on the performance of the LSTM. In addition, the ill-conditioned problem occurs in the training process of LSTM and adversely affects its convergence. In this work, a simple and effective method of the gradient activation is applied to the LSTM, while empirical criteria for choosing gradient activation hyperparameters are found. Activating the gradient refers to modifying the gradient with a specific function named the gradient activation function. Moreover, different activation functions and different gradient operations are compared to prove that the gradient activation is effective on LSTM. Furthermore, comparative experiments are conducted, and their results show that the gradient activation alleviates the above problems and accelerates the convergence of the LSTM. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/LongJin-lab/ACT-In-NLP.

Keywords: Exploding gradient problem; Gradient activation; Ill-conditioned problem; Long short-term memory (LSTM); Vanishing gradient problem.