QRN is a purely sequential model like LSTM or GRU (but simpler than them) for story-based question answering (bAbI QA tasks). QRN is implemented using TensorFlow. Here are some notable results (error rates in %) on bAbI QA 1k dataset:

See model details and more results in this paper.

We are assuming you are working in a Linux environment. Make sure that you have Python (developed on 3.5), and you installed these Python packages: tensorflow (0.8 or higher, get it here), and progressbar2.

First, download bAbI QA dataset (note that this downloads the dataset to $HOME/data/babi):

chmod +x download.sh; ./download.sh 

Then preprocess the data for a particular task, say Task 2 (this stores the preprocessed data in data/babi/en/02/):

python -m prepro --task 2

Finally, you train the model (test is automatically performed at the end):

python -m babi.main --noload --task 2

It took ~3 minutes on my laptop using CPU.

You can run it several times with new weight initialization (e.g. 10) and report the test result with the lowest dev loss:

python -m babi.main --noload --task 2 --num_trials 10

This is critical to stably get the reported results; some weight initialization leads to a bad optima.

After training and testing, the result is stored in evals/babi/en/02-None-00-01/test_0150.json. We can visualize the magnitudes of the update and reset gates using the result file. Note that you need jinja2 (Python package). Run the following command to host a web server for visualization and open it via browser:

python -m babi.visualize_result --task 2 --open True

then click the file(s). It takes a a few seconds to load the heatmap coloring of the gate values. You will see something like this:

By default visualize_result retrieves the first trial (1). If you want to retrieve a particular trial number, specify the trial number if --trial_num option.

To train the model on 10k dataset, first preprocess the data with large flag:

python -m prepro --task 2 --large True

Then train the model with large flag as well:

python -m babi.main --noload --task 2 --large True --batch_size 128

Note that the batch size is increased to 128.

Finally, visualization requires the large flag:

python -m babi.visualize_result --task 2 --open True --large True

To control other parameters and see other options, type:

python -m babi.main -h