MuFuRU: The Multi-Function Recurrent Unit

Abstract: Recurrent neural networks such as the GRU and LSTM found wide adoption in natural language processing and achieve state-of-the-art results for many tasks. These models are characterized by a memory state that can be written to and read from by applying gated composition operations to the current input and the previous state. However, they only cover a small subset of potentially useful compositions. We propose Multi-Function Recurrent Units (MuFuRUs) that allow for arbitrary differentiable functions as composition operations. Furthermore, MuFuRUs allow for an input- and state-dependent choice of these composition operations that is learned. Our experiments demonstrate that the additional functionality helps in different sequence modeling tasks, including the evaluation of propositional logic formulae, language modeling and sentiment analysis.