English

Surprisal-Triggered Conditional Computation with Neural Networks

Machine Learning 2020-06-03 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Autoregressive neural network models have been used successfully for sequence generation, feature extraction, and hypothesis scoring. This paper presents yet another use for these models: allocating more computation to more difficult inputs. In our model, an autoregressive model is used both to extract features and to predict observations in a stream of input observations. The surprisal of the input, measured as the negative log-likelihood of the current observation according to the autoregressive model, is used as a measure of input difficulty. This in turn determines whether a small, fast network, or a big, slow network, is used. Experiments on two speech recognition tasks show that our model can match the performance of a baseline in which the big network is always used with 15% fewer FLOPs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.01659,
  title  = {Surprisal-Triggered Conditional Computation with Neural Networks},
  author = {Loren Lugosch and Derek Nowrouzezahrai and Brett H. Meyer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.01659},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:59:45.505Z