English

Using Fast Weights to Attend to the Recent Past

Machine Learning 2016-12-06 v3 Machine Learning Neural and Evolutionary Computing

Abstract

Until recently, research on artificial neural networks was largely restricted to systems with only two types of variable: Neural activities that represent the current or recent input and weights that learn to capture regularities among inputs, outputs and payoffs. There is no good reason for this restriction. Synapses have dynamics at many different time-scales and this suggests that artificial neural networks might benefit from variables that change slower than activities but much faster than the standard weights. These "fast weights" can be used to store temporary memories of the recent past and they provide a neurally plausible way of implementing the type of attention to the past that has recently proved very helpful in sequence-to-sequence models. By using fast weights we can avoid the need to store copies of neural activity patterns.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1610.06258,
  title  = {Using Fast Weights to Attend to the Recent Past},
  author = {Jimmy Ba and Geoffrey Hinton and Volodymyr Mnih and Joel Z. Leibo and Catalin Ionescu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.06258},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

Added [Schmidhuber 1993] citation to the last paragraph of the introduction. Fixed typo appendix A.1 uniform initialization to 1/\sqrt{H}

R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:26:06.867Z