They can remember information for hundreds of steps, making them ideal for text generation, speech recognition, and complex time series. GRU (Gated Recurrent Unit) GRUs are a simpler, faster alternative to LSTMs. They merge the forget and input gates into a single "update gate" and combine the cell state with the hidden state. GRUs perform similarly to LSTMs on many tasks but with fewer parameters.
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| Architecture | # Gates | Cell State | Best for | |--------------|---------|------------|-----------| | Simple RNN | 0 | No | Very short sequences | | LSTM | 3 | Yes | Long dependencies, complex data | | GRU | 2 | No | Smaller datasets, faster training | While Theano is no longer actively developed (it was a pioneer, but most have moved to TensorFlow/PyTorch), many legacy systems and research codebases still use it. Here's how you'd build an LSTM for sentiment analysis using Theano with the Keras 1.x API: They can remember information for hundreds of steps,
In this post, we’ll cut through the hype and get practical. You'll learn the core RNN architectures (Simple RNN, LSTM, GRU), and implement them in Python using (via the Keras wrapper, which historically used Theano as a backend). Even if you now use TensorFlow or PyTorch, understanding the Theano-era patterns will solidify your fundamentals.
Let’s dive in. A standard dense layer assumes no temporal order. It doesn't know that the word following "I ate" is likely food-related, or that yesterday's stock price influences today's. RNNs solve this with a hidden state — a vector that gets passed from one time step to the next. The Simple RNN (Vanilla RNN) The simplest form has a loop. At each time step t , it takes the current input x_t and the previous hidden state h_t-1 , and produces a new hidden state h_t . GRUs perform similarly to LSTMs on many tasks
import theano import theano.tensor as T import numpy as np x_t = T.matrix('input') h_prev = T.matrix('hidden_prev') W_xh = theano.shared(np.random.randn(input_dim, hidden_dim)) W_hh = theano.shared(np.random.randn(hidden_dim, hidden_dim)) b_h = theano.shared(np.zeros(hidden_dim))
h_t = tanh(W_x * x_t + W_h * h_t-1 + b)
In Python (with Theano-style tensors), a naive implementation looks like: