Four effective ways to learn an RNN and preparing for next week

  1. Long Short Term Memory Make the RNN out of little modules that are designed to remember values for a long time.
  2. Hessian Free Optimization: Deal with the vanishing gradients problem by using a fancy optimizer that can detect directions with a tiny gradient but even smaller curvature.
  3. Echo State Networks: Initialize the input a hidden and hidden-hidden and output-hidden connections very carefully so that the hidden state has a huge reservoir of weakly coupled oscillators which can be selectively driven by the input.
  4. Good initialization with momentum Initialize like in Echo State Networks, but then learn all of the connections using momentum