Convolutional Sequence Modeling Revisited
This paper revisits the problem of sequence modeling using convolutional architectures. Although both convolutional and recurrent architectures have a long history in sequence prediction, the current "default" mindset in much of the deep learning community is that generic sequence modeling is best handled using recurrent networks. The goal of this paper is to question this assumption. Specifically, we consider a simple generic temporal convolution network (TCN), which adopts features from modern ConvNet architectures such as a dilations and residual connections. We show that on a variety of sequence modeling tasks, including many frequently used as benchmarks for evaluating recurrent networks, the TCN outperforms baseline RNN methods (LSTMs, GRUs, and vanilla RNNs) and sometimes even highly specialized approaches. We further show that the potential "infinite memory" advantage that RNNs have over TCNs is largely absent in practice: TCNs indeed exhibit longer effective history sizes than their recurrent counterparts. As a whole, we argue that it may be time to (re)consider ConvNets as the default "go to" architecture for sequence modeling.
 In this paper, the authors argue for the use of convolutional architectures as a general purpose tool for sequence modeling. They start by proposing a generic temporal convolution sequence model which leverages recent advances in the field, discuss the respective advantages of convolutional and recurrent networks, and benchmark their architecture on a number of different tasks. The paper is clearly written and easy to follow, does a good job of presenting both the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed method, and convincingly makes the point that convolutional architectures should at least be considered for any sequence modeling task; they are indeed still often overlooked, in spite of some strong performances in language modeling and translation in recent works. The only part which is slightly less convincing is the section about effective memory size. While it is true that learning longer term dependencies can be difficult in standard RNN architectures, it is interesting to notice that the SoTA results presented in appendix B.3 for language modeling on larger data sets are architectures which focus on remedying this difficulty (cache model and hierarchical LSTM). It would also be interesting to see how TCN works on word prediction tasks which are devised explicitly to test for longer memory, such as Lambada (1) or Children Books Test (2). As a minor point, adding a measure of complexity in terms of number of operations could be a useful hardware-independent indication of the computational cost of the architecture. Pros: - Clearly written, well executed paper - Makes a strong point for the use of convolutional architecture for sequences - Provides useful benchmarks for the community Cons: - The claims on effective memory size need more context and justification 1: The LAMBADA dataset: Word prediction requiring a broad discourse context, Paperno et al. 2016 2: The Goldilocks principle: reading children*s books with explicit memory representation, Hill et al. 2016
You are a member of the scientific community tasked with peer review. Review the following paper title and abstract.
### Title + Abstract
Convolutional Sequence Modeling Revisited
This paper revisits the problem of sequence modeling using convolutional architectures. Although both convolutional and recurrent architectures have a long history in sequence prediction, the current "default" mindset in much of the deep learning community is that generic sequence modeling is best handled using recurrent networks. The goal of this paper is to question this assumption. Specifically, we consider a simple generic temporal convolution network (TCN), which adopts features from modern ConvNet architectures such as a dilations and residual connections. We show that on a variety of sequence modeling tasks, including many frequently used as benchmarks for evaluating recurrent networks, the TCN outperforms baseline RNN methods (LSTMs, GRUs, and vanilla RNNs) and sometimes even highly specialized approaches. We further show that the potential "infinite memory" advantage that RNNs have over TCNs is largely absent in practice: TCNs indeed exhibit longer effective history sizes than their recurrent counterparts. As a whole, we argue that it may be time to (re)consider ConvNets as the default "go to" architecture for sequence modeling.
user
<think>Okay, to do a decent peer review, I should start with summarizing what the work is about. This includes novelty, contributions, clarity, and impact. I might include suggestions to issues that I find critical to the usefulness of the work. Starting with novelty, there are different types of novelty. The first aspect of novelty is scope and scale. Is the work covering a broader perspective than previous works? The second aspect is methodology. Is the proposed methodology novel compared to previous methods? Do they provide any significant advantage over previous methodologies? The third aspect is results. Are the results different compared previous work? Does this lead to any novel theories or an extension of current theories? Next is clarity, I will be reading the work in depth and analyze if any sentences can be potentially ambiguous or misleading. If any sentences are ambiguous, I will state them and give a suggestion on how to rephrase such sentence or how to make more clear to the audience. Lastly, impact is important. I will attempt to predict how such work will impact the scientific community. This might include the applications of such work and how the work might transform the way we study a certain topic. Finally, I will might only mention issues that are critical. This is to keep the review as concise and helpful as possible.</think>



 In this paper, the authors argue for the use of convolutional architectures as a general purpose tool for sequence modeling. They start by proposing a generic temporal convolution sequence model which leverages recent advances in the field, discuss the respective advantages of convolutional and recurrent networks, and benchmark their architecture on a number of different tasks. The paper is clearly written and easy to follow, does a good job of presenting both the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed method, and convincingly makes the point that convolutional architectures should at least be considered for any sequence modeling task; they are indeed still often overlooked, in spite of some strong performances in language modeling and translation in recent works. The only part which is slightly less convincing is the section about effective memory size. While it is true that learning longer term dependencies can be difficult in standard RNN architectures, it is interesting to notice that the SoTA results presented in appendix B.3 for language modeling on larger data sets are architectures which focus on remedying this difficulty (cache model and hierarchical LSTM). It would also be interesting to see how TCN works on word prediction tasks which are devised explicitly to test for longer memory, such as Lambada (1) or Children Books Test (2). As a minor point, adding a measure of complexity in terms of number of operations could be a useful hardware-independent indication of the computational cost of the architecture. Pros: - Clearly written, well executed paper - Makes a strong point for the use of convolutional architecture for sequences - Provides useful benchmarks for the community Cons: - The claims on effective memory size need more context and justification 1: The LAMBADA dataset: Word prediction requiring a broad discourse context, Paperno et al. 2016 2: The Goldilocks principle: reading children*s books with explicit memory representation, Hill et al. 2016
assistant
 In this paper, the authors argue for the use of convolutional architectures as a general purpose tool for sequence modeling. They start by proposing a generic temporal convolution sequence model which leverages recent advances in the field, discuss the respective advantages of convolutional and recurrent networks, and benchmark their architecture on a number of different tasks. The paper is clearly written and easy to follow, does a good job of presenting both the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed method, and convincingly makes the point that convolutional architectures should at least be considered for any sequence modeling task; they are indeed still often overlooked, in spite of some strong performances in language modeling and translation in recent works. The only part which is slightly less convincing is the section about effective memory size. While it is true that learning longer term dependencies can be difficult in standard RNN architectures, it is interesting to notice that the SoTA results presented in appendix B.3 for language modeling on larger data sets are architectures which focus on remedying this difficulty (cache model and hierarchical LSTM). It would also be interesting to see how TCN works on word prediction tasks which are devised explicitly to test for longer memory, such as Lambada (1) or Children Books Test (2). As a minor point, adding a measure of complexity in terms of number of operations could be a useful hardware-independent indication of the computational cost of the architecture. Pros: - Clearly written, well executed paper - Makes a strong point for the use of convolutional architecture for sequences - Provides useful benchmarks for the community Cons: - The claims on effective memory size need more context and justification 1: The LAMBADA dataset: Word prediction requiring a broad discourse context, Paperno et al. 2016 2: The Goldilocks principle: reading children*s books with explicit memory representation, Hill et al. 2016