# 8.6. Concise Implementation of Recurrent Neural Networks¶ Open the notebook in Colab Open the notebook in Colab Open the notebook in Colab

While Section 8.5 was instructive to see how recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are implemented, this is not convenient or fast. This section will show how to implement the same language model more efficiently using functions provided by Gluon. We begin as before by reading the “Time Machine” corpus.

from d2l import mxnet as d2l
from mxnet import np, npx
from mxnet.gluon import nn, rnn
npx.set_np()

batch_size, num_steps = 32, 35


## 8.6.1. Defining the Model¶

Gluon’s rnn module provides a recurrent neural network implementation (beyond many other sequence models). We construct the recurrent neural network layer rnn_layer with a single hidden layer and 256 hidden units, and initialize the weights.

num_hiddens = 256
rnn_layer = rnn.RNN(num_hiddens)
rnn_layer.initialize()


Initializing the state is straightforward. We invoke the member function rnn_layer.begin_state(batch_size). This returns an initial state for each element in the minibatch. That is, it returns an object of size (hidden layers, batch size, number of hidden units). The number of hidden layers defaults to be 1. In fact, we have not even discussed yet what it means to have multiple layers—this will happen in Section 9.3. For now, suffice it to say that multiple layers simply amount to the output of one RNN being used as the input for the next RNN.

batch_size = 1
state = rnn_layer.begin_state(batch_size=batch_size)
len(state), state[0].shape

(1, (1, 1, 256))


With a state variable and an input, we can compute the output with the updated state.

num_steps = 1
X = np.random.uniform(size=(num_steps, batch_size, len(vocab)))
Y, state_new = rnn_layer(X, state)
Y.shape, len(state_new), state_new[0].shape

((1, 1, 256), 1, (1, 1, 256))


Similar to Section 8.5, we define an RNNModel block by subclassing the Block class for a complete recurrent neural network. Note that rnn_layer only contains the hidden recurrent layers, we need to create a separate output layer. While in the previous section, we have the output layer within the rnn block.

#@save
class RNNModel(nn.Block):
def __init__(self, rnn_layer, vocab_size, **kwargs):
super(RNNModel, self).__init__(**kwargs)
self.rnn = rnn_layer
self.vocab_size = vocab_size
self.dense = nn.Dense(vocab_size)

def forward(self, inputs, state):
X = npx.one_hot(inputs.T, self.vocab_size)
Y, state = self.rnn(X, state)
# The fully connected layer will first change the shape of Y to
# (num_steps * batch_size, num_hiddens). Its output shape is
# (num_steps * batch_size, vocab_size).
output = self.dense(Y.reshape(-1, Y.shape[-1]))
return output, state

def begin_state(self, *args, **kwargs):
return self.rnn.begin_state(*args, **kwargs)


## 8.6.2. Training and Predicting¶

Before training the model, let us make a prediction with the a model that has random weights.

ctx = d2l.try_gpu()
model = RNNModel(rnn_layer, len(vocab))
model.initialize(force_reinit=True, ctx=ctx)
d2l.predict_ch8('time traveller', 10, model, vocab, ctx)

'time travellervmjznnngii'


As is quite obvious, this model does not work at all. Next, we call train_ch8 with the same hyper-parameters defined in Section 8.5 and train our model with Gluon.

num_epochs, lr = 500, 1
d2l.train_ch8(model, train_iter, vocab, lr, num_epochs, ctx)

perplexity 1.2, 187975.3 tokens/sec on gpu(0)
time traveller  you can show black is white by argument said fil
traveller  it s against reason said filby  can a cube have


Compared with the last section, this model achieves comparable perplexity, albeit within a shorter period of time, due to the code being more optimized.

## 8.6.3. Summary¶

• Gluon’s rnn module provides an implementation at the recurrent neural network layer.

• Gluon’s nn.RNN instance returns the output and hidden state after forward computation. This forward computation does not involve output layer computation.

• As before, the computational graph needs to be detached from previous steps for reasons of efficiency.

## 8.6.4. Exercises¶

1. Compare the implementation with the previous section.

• Why does Gluon’s implementation run faster?

• If you observe a significant difference beyond speed, try to find the reason.

2. Can you make the model overfit?

• Increase the number of hidden units.

• Increase the number of iterations.

• What happens if you adjust the clipping parameter?

3. Implement the autoregressive model of the introduction to the current chapter using an RNN.

4. What happens if you increase the number of hidden layers in the RNN model? Can you make the model work?

5. How well can you compress the text using this model?

• How many bits do you need?

• Why does not everyone use this model for text compression? Hint: what about the compressor itself?

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