Gated Linear Unit

Note

A gated linear unit is often abbreviated as a GRU. Not to be confused with the one in Despicable Me!

What are GRUs?

GRU is a special kind of recurrent layer. It allows some input to pass the ‘gate’, but transform the other parts. The mechanism is highly inspired by LSTMs.

When to use GRUs?

Gate linear units are a lot like LSTMs. It is much less complicated compare to LSTM, so it’s often used as a cheap replacement to LSTMs. Its performance is not too shabby, and it trains a lot faster compared to similar sized LSTM networks.