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arXiv · 2209.15502

Efficient LSTM Training with Eligibility Traces

Michael Hoyer·Shahram Eivazi·Sebastian Otte
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Abstract

Training recurrent neural networks is predominantly achieved via backpropagation through time (BPTT). However, this algorithm is not an optimal solution from both a biological and computational perspective. A more efficient and biologically plausible alternative for BPTT is e-prop. We investigate the applicability of e-prop to long short-term memorys (LSTMs), for both supervised and reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. We show that e-prop is a suitable optimization algorithm for LSTMs by comparing it to BPTT on two benchmarks for supervised learning. This proves that e-prop can achieve learning even for problems with long sequences of several hundred timesteps. We introduce extensions that improve the performance of e-prop, which can partially be applied to other network architectures. With the help of these extensions we show that, under certain conditions, e-prop can outperform BPTT for one of the two benchmarks for supervised learning. Finally, we deliver a proof of concept for the integration of e-prop to RL in the domain of deep recurrent Q-learning.

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BibTeXRIS

Michael Hoyer, Shahram Eivazi, Sebastian Otte. 2022-09-30. Efficient LSTM Training with Eligibility Traces. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15934-3_28

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