On the vanishing and exploding gradient problem in Gated Recurrent Units

Abstract

Recurrent Neural Networks are applied in areas such as speech recognition, natural language and video processing, and the identification of nonlinear state space models. Conventional Recurrent Neural Networks, e.g. the Elman Network, are hard to train. A more recently developed class of recurrent neural networks, so-called Gated Units, outperform their counterparts on virtually every task. This paper aims to provide additional insights into the differences between RNNs and Gated Units in order to explain the superior perfomance of gated recurrent units. It is argued, that Gated Units are easier to optimize not because they solve the vanishing gradient problem, but because they circumvent the emergence of large local gradients.