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Were RNNs All We Needed?

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arxiv 2410.01201 v3 pith:LHIA7KCL submitted 2024-10-02 cs.LG cs.AI

classification cs.LGcs.AI
keywords transformersmodelssequenceduringmodellingparallelizableperformancerecurrent
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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The introduction of Transformers in 2017 reshaped the landscape of deep learning. Originally proposed for sequence modelling, Transformers have since achieved widespread success across various domains. However, the scalability limitations of Transformers - particularly with respect to sequence length - have sparked renewed interest in novel recurrent models that are parallelizable during training, offer comparable performance, and scale more effectively. In this work, we revisit sequence modelling from a historical perspective, focusing on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), which dominated the field for two decades before the rise of Transformers. Specifically, we examine LSTMs (1997) and GRUs (2014). We demonstrate that by simplifying these models, we can derive minimal versions (minLSTMs and minGRUs) that (1) use fewer parameters than their traditional counterparts, (2) are fully parallelizable during training, and (3) achieve surprisingly competitive performance on a range of tasks, rivalling recent models including Transformers.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Pretraining Recurrent Networks without Recurrence

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    SMT trains nonlinear RNNs by imitating one-step memory-transition labels generated by a Transformer, replacing BPTT's unrolled credit assignment with time-parallel supervised learning.

  2. EEvAct: Early Event-Based Action Recognition with High-Rate Two-Stream Spiking Neural Networks

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    A high-rate two-stream spiking network with a lightweight gated fusion unit achieves 94.9% on THU EACT-50 and enables early prediction within 100 ms.

  3. AuroraLong: Bringing RNNs Back to Efficient Open-Ended Video Understanding

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    A 2B-parameter video-language model using an RWKV linear-RNN backbone and sorted token merging achieves competitive long-video QA accuracy with far lower memory cost than transformer-based models.

  4. GraphMinNet: Learning Dependencies in Graphs with Light Complexity Minimal Architecture

    cs.LG 2025-02 reject novelty 6.0 of 10

    A gated recurrent graph architecture that applies minGRU-style gating to node embeddings with Laplacian positional encoding, reporting state-of-the-art on several benchmarks and claiming linear-time long-range depende...

  5. Temporal horizons in forecasting: a performance-learnability trade-off

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Longer training horizons improve forecast quality but worsen learnability, with loss-landscape roughness growing exponentially for chaotic dynamics and linearly for limit cycles.

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