Complex Sequential Understanding through the Awareness of Spatial and Temporal Concepts

Understanding sequential information is a fundamental task for artificial intelligence. Current neural networks attempt to learn spatial and temporal information as a whole, limited their abilities to represent large scale spatial representations over long-range sequences. Here, we introduce a new modeling strategy called Semi-Coupled Structure (SCS), which consists of deep neural networks that decouple the complex spatial and temporal concepts learning. Semi-Coupled Structure can learn to implicitly separate input information into independent parts and process these parts respectively. Experiments demonstrate that a Semi-Coupled Structure can successfully annotate the outline of an object in images sequentially and perform video action recognition. For sequence-to-sequence problems, a Semi-Coupled Structure can predict future meteorological radar echo images based on observed images. Taken together, our results demonstrate that a Semi-Coupled Structure has the capacity to improve the performance of LSTM-like models on large scale sequential tasks.