A Recurrent Latent Variable Model for Sequential Data

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 28 (NIPS 2015)

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Authors

Junyoung Chung, Kyle Kastner, Laurent Dinh, Kratarth Goel, Aaron C. Courville, Yoshua Bengio

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the inclusion of latent random variables into the hidden state of a recurrent neural network (RNN) by combining the elements of the variational autoencoder. We argue that through the use of high-level latent random variables, the variational RNN (VRNN) can model the kind of variability observed in highly structured sequential data such as natural speech. We empirically evaluate the proposed model against other related sequential models on four speech datasets and one handwriting dataset. Our results show the important roles that latent random variables can play in the RNN dynamics.