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### Eigenvalue Normalized Recurrent Neural Networks for Short Term Memory

The underlying dynamical system carries temporal information from one time step to another and captures potential dependencies among the terms of a sequence. Like other deep neural networks, the weights of an RNN are learned by gradient descent. For the input at a time step to affect the output at a later time step, the gradients must back-propagate through each step. Since a sequence can be quite long, RNNs are prone to suffer from vanishing or exploding gradients as described in (Bengio, Frasconi, and Simard 1993) and (Pas-canu, Mikolov, and Bengio 2013). One consequence of this well-known problem is the difficulty of the network to model input-output dependency over a large number of time steps. There have been many different architectures that are designed to mitigate this problem. The most popular RNN architectures such as LSTMs (Hochreiter and Schmidhu-ber 1997) and GRUs (Cho et al. 2014), incorporate a gating mechanism to explicitly retain or discard information.

### Improved memory in recurrent neural networks with sequential non-normal dynamics

Training recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is a hard problem due to degeneracies in the optimization landscape, a problem also known as the vanishing/exploding gradients problem. Short of designing new RNN architectures, various methods for dealing with this problem that have been previously proposed usually boil down to orthogonalization of the recurrent dynamics, either at initialization or during the entire training period. The basic motivation behind these methods is that orthogonal transformations are isometries of the Euclidean space, hence they preserve (Euclidean) norms and effectively deal with the vanishing/exploding gradients problem. However, this idea ignores the crucial effects of non-linearity and noise. In the presence of a non-linearity, orthogonal transformations no longer preserve norms, suggesting that alternative transformations might be better suited to non-linear networks. Moreover, in the presence of noise, norm preservation itself ceases to be the ideal objective. A more sensible objective is maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the propagated signal instead. Previous work has shown that in the linear case, recurrent networks that maximize the SNR display strongly non-normal dynamics and orthogonal networks are highly suboptimal by this measure. Motivated by this finding, in this paper, we investigate the potential of non-normal RNNs, i.e. RNNs with a non-normal recurrent connectivity matrix, in sequential processing tasks. Our experimental results show that non-normal RNNs significantly outperform their orthogonal counterparts in a diverse range of benchmarks. We also find evidence for increased non-normality and hidden chain-like feedforward structures in trained RNNs initialized with orthogonal recurrent connectivity matrices.

### How Robust are Deep Neural Networks?

Convolutional and Recurrent, deep neural networks have been successful in machine learning systems for computer vision, reinforcement learning, and other allied fields. However, the robustness of such neural networks is seldom apprised, especially after high classification accuracy has been attained. In this paper, we evaluate the robustness of three recurrent neural networks to tiny perturbations, on three widely used datasets, to argue that high accuracy does not always mean a stable and a robust (to bounded perturbations, adversarial attacks, etc.) system. Especially, normalizing the spectrum of the discrete recurrent network to bound the spectrum (using power method, Rayleigh quotient, etc.) on a unit disk produces stable, albeit highly non-robust neural networks. Furthermore, using the $\epsilon$-pseudo-spectrum, we show that training of recurrent networks, say using gradient-based methods, often result in non-normal matrices that may or may not be diagonalizable. Therefore, the open problem lies in constructing methods that optimize not only for accuracy but also for the stability and the robustness of the underlying neural network, a criterion that is distinct from the other.

### Orthogonal Recurrent Neural Networks with Scaled Cayley Transform

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are designed to handle sequential data but suffer from vanishing or exploding gradients. Recent work on Unitary Recurrent Neural Networks (uRNNs) have been used to address this issue and in some cases, exceed the capabilities of Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTMs). We propose a simpler and novel update scheme to maintain orthogonal recurrent weight matrices without using complex valued matrices. This is done by parametrizing with a skew-symmetric matrix using the Cayley transform. Such a parametrization is unable to represent matrices with negative one eigenvalues, but this limitation is overcome by scaling the recurrent weight matrix by a diagonal matrix consisting of ones and negative ones. The proposed training scheme involves a straightforward gradient calculation and update step. In several experiments, the proposed scaled Cayley orthogonal recurrent neural network (scoRNN) achieves superior results with fewer trainable parameters than other unitary RNNs.

### Towards Non-saturating Recurrent Units for Modelling Long-term Dependencies

Modelling long-term dependencies is a challenge for recurrent neural networks. This is primarily due to the fact that gradients vanish during training, as the sequence length increases. Gradients can be attenuated by transition operators and are attenuated or dropped by activation functions. Canonical architectures like LSTM alleviate this issue by skipping information through a memory mechanism. We propose a new recurrent architecture (Non-saturating Recurrent Unit; NRU) that relies on a memory mechanism but forgoes both saturating activation functions and saturating gates, in order to further alleviate vanishing gradients. In a series of synthetic and real world tasks, we demonstrate that the proposed model is the only model that performs among the top 2 models across all tasks with and without long-term dependencies, when compared against a range of other architectures.