Warming-up recurrent neural networks to maximize reachable multi-stability greatly improves learning

Training recurrent neural networks is known to be difficult when time dependencies become long. Consequently, training standard gated cells such as gated recurrent units and long-short term memory on benchmarks where long-term memory is required remains an arduous task. In this work, we propose a general way to initialize any recurrent network connectivity through a process called "warm-up" to improve its capability to learn arbitrarily long time dependencies. This initialization process is designed to maximize network reachable multi-stability, i.e. the number of attractors within the network that can be reached through relevant input trajectories. Warming-up is performed before training, using stochastic gradient descent on a specifically designed loss. We show that warming-up greatly improves recurrent neural network performance on long-term memory benchmarks for multiple recurrent cell types, but can sometimes impede precision. We therefore introduce a parallel recurrent network structure with partial warm-up that is shown to greatly improve learning on long time-series while maintaining high levels of precision. This approach provides a general framework for improving learning abilities of any recurrent cell type when long-term memory is required.