ADAndis Draguns

Andis Draguns

*This is an algorithmically generated author record based on publicly available information.

Current Organizations / Institutes

The organizations/institutes from the scholar's latest article

Previous Organizations / Institutes

The organizations / institutes from the scholar's other articles in the past ten years


Andis Draguns has a total of 8 co-authors. Here are the top co-authors by number of shared publications:


Latest Publications

  • Open Access

    Gates Are Not What You Need in RNNs

    by Ronalds Zakovskis, Andis Draguns, Eliza Gaile, Emils Ozolins, Karlis Freivalds

    Recurrent neural networks have flourished in many areas. Consequently, we can see new RNN cells being developed continuously, usually by creating or using gates in a new, original way. But what if we told you that gates in RNNs are redundant? In this paper, we propose a new recurrent cell called Residual Recurrent Unit (RRU) which beats traditional cells and does not employ a single gate. It is based on the residual shortcut connection, linear transformations, ReLU, and normalization. To evaluate our cell's effectiveness, we compare its performance against the widely-used GRU and LSTM cells and the recently proposed Mogrifier LSTM on several tasks including, polyphonic music modeling, language modeling, and sentiment analysis. Our experiments show that RRU outperforms the traditional gated units on most of these tasks. Also, it has better robustness to parameter selection, allowing immediate application in new tasks without much tuning. We have implemented the RRU in TensorFlow, and the code is made available at https://github.com/LUMII-Syslab/RRU .

  • Gates Are Not What You Need in RNNs

    by Ronalds Zakovskis, Andis Draguns, Eliza Gaile, Emils Ozolins, Karlis Freivalds


  • Unsupervised Training for Neural TSP Solver

    by Elīza Gaile, Andis Draguns, Emīls Ozoliņš, Kārlis Freivalds


  • Open Access

    Residual Shuffle-Exchange Networks for Fast Processing of Long Sequences

    by Andis Draguns, Emīls Ozoliņš, Agris Šostaks, Matīss Apinis, Kārlis Freivalds

    Attention is a commonly used mechanism in sequence processing, but it is of O(n^2) complexity which prevents its application to long sequences. The recently introduced neural Shuffle-Exchange network offers a computation-efficient alternative, enabling the modelling of long-range dependencies in O(n log n) time. The model, however, is quite complex, involving a sophisticated gating mechanism derived from the Gated Recurrent Unit. In this paper, we present a simple and lightweight variant of the Shuffle-Exchange network, which is based on a residual network employing GELU and Layer Normalization. The proposed architecture not only scales to longer sequences but also converges faster and provides better accuracy. It surpasses the Shuffle-Exchange network on the LAMBADA language modelling task and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MusicNet dataset for music transcription while being efficient in the number of parameters. We show how to combine the improved Shuffle-Exchange network with convolutional layers, establishing it as a useful building block in long sequence processing applications.