Abstract

Sequential behavior is essential to intelligence, and it is a fundamental part of human activities ranging from reasoning to language, and from everyday skills to complex problem solving. In particular, sequence learning is an important component of learning in many task domains — planning, reasoning, robotics, natural language processing, speech recognition, adaptive control, time series prediction, financial engineering, DNA sequencing, and so on. Naturally, there are many different approaches towards sequence learning, resulting from different perspectives taken in different task domains. These approaches deal with somewhat differently formulated sequential learning problems (for example, some with actions and some without), and/ or different aspects of sequence learning (for example, sequence prediction vs. sequence recognition). Sequence learning is clearly a difiicult task. More powerful algorithms for sequence learning are needed in all of these afore-mentioned domains. It is our view that the right approach to develop better techniques, algorithms, models.