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An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling

2018/03/04 by Shaojie Bai, J. Zico Kolter, Bai, Shaojie +3 · 3 voices · 4,357 citations
Computer Science · #Artificial intelligence #Artificial neural network #Benchmark (surveying) #Code (set theory) #Computer science #Convolutional neural network #Deep learning #Machine learning #Machine translation #Music and Audio Processing #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Natural language processing #Programming language #Recurrent neural network #Sequence (biology) #Sequence labeling #Set (abstract data type) #Task (project management) #Topic Modeling #cs.AI #cs.CL #cs.LG

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1803.01271

published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)

openalex publication_date 2018/03/04 · arxiv created 2018/04/19 · arxiv updated 2018/04/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

For most deep learning practitioners, sequence modeling is synonymous with recurrent networks. Yet recent results indicate that convolutional architectures can outperform recurrent networks on tasks such as audio synthesis and machine translation. Given a new sequence modeling task or dataset, which architecture should one use? We conduct a systematic evaluation of generic convolutional and recurrent architectures for sequence modeling. The models are evaluated across a broad range of standard tasks that are commonly used to benchmark recurrent networks. Our results indicate that a simple convolutional architecture outperforms canonical recurrent networks such as LSTMs across a diverse range of tasks and datasets, while demonstrating longer effective memory. We conclude that the common association between sequence modeling and recurrent networks should be reconsidered, and convolutional networks should be regarded as a natural starting point for sequence modeling tasks. To assist related work, we have made code available at http://github.com/locuslab/TCN .

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