Lie Access Neural Turing Machine

Abstract

Following the recent trend in explicit neural memory structures, we present a new design of an external memory, wherein memories are stored in an Euclidean key space $\mathbb R^n$. An LSTM controller performs read and write via specialized read and write heads. It can move a head by either providing a new address in the key space (aka random access) or moving from its previous position via a Lie group action (aka Lie access). In this way, the "L" and "R" instructions of a traditional Turing Machine are generalized to arbitrary elements of a fixed Lie group action. For this reason, we name this new model the Lie Access Neural Turing Machine, or LANTM. We tested two different configurations of LANTM against an LSTM baseline in several basic experiments. We found the right configuration of LANTM to outperform the baseline in all of our experiments. In particular, we trained LANTM on addition of $k$-digit numbers for $2 \le k \le 16$, but it was able to generalize almost perfectly to $17 \le k \le 32$, all with the number of parameters 2 orders of magnitude below the LSTM baseline.