Minimum Description Length Recurrent Neural Networks

10/31/2021

∙

by   Nur Lan, et al.

∙

0

∙

share

We train neural networks to optimize a Minimum Description Length score, i.e., to balance between the complexity of the network and its accuracy at a task. We show that networks trained with this objective function master tasks involving memory challenges such as counting, including cases that go beyond context-free languages. These learners master grammars for, e.g., a^nb^n, a^nb^nc^n, a^nb^2n, and a^nb^mc^n+m, and they perform addition. They do so with 100 also small and their inner workings are transparent. We thus provide formal proofs that their perfect accuracy holds not only on a given test set, but for any input sequence.