Felix A. Gers 2026-11-05
Felix A. Gers is a researcher in machine learning and recurrent neural networks. His institutional profile connects his research with long short-term memory; the full-name byline of his2000paper verifies the name used here.[ref] [ref]
Learning to Forget: Continual Prediction with LSTM by Felix A. Gers, Jürgen Schmidhuber and Fred Cummins. MIT Press full author byline; DOI10.1162/089976600300015015
With Jürgen Schmidhuber and Fred Cummins, he introduced the adaptive LSTM forget gate to address continual input streams lacking externally marked reset points. The gate lets a LSTM memory cell learn when to reduce retained state, rather than requiring every sequence boundary to be supplied from outside.[ref]
Learning to Forget: Continual Prediction with LSTM by Felix A. Gers, Jürgen Schmidhuber and Fred Cummins. Abstract: continual prediction and learned resets
A scalar toy update makes selective retention tangible:Here is a retention multiplier and a new contribution. With and , choices , and retain , and respectively. This arithmetic illustrates one role of a LSTM forget gate; it omits the other gates and training equations of a complete long short-term memory network. Forgetting stored state is also distinct from discarding all learned network parameters.
Felix Gers, identified on his BHT research profile
. External institutional portrait from Felix Gers profile by BHT. Forget gate in long short-term memory 2026-11-05
The forget gate in long short-term memory controls retention of the previous memory state in a long short-term memory recurrent neural network. In a simplified modern update,Each component of multiplies the corresponding old memory component. Values near one retain it strongly; values near zero suppress it. The input gate in long short-term memory controls the separate new-write term.[ref]
LSTM: A Search Space Odyssey by Klaus Greff and others. Section II and Figure 1; simplified form here omits peepholes.
If a scalar gate stays at and the new-write term is zero, then after steps . The half-retention time isThis gives an interpretable timescale for a learned multiplicative gate. An exact no-write term is an illustrative condition; finite logistic sigmoid function outputs are strictly between zero and one, though the candidate can itself be zero.
The forget gate was added after the 1997 architecture. Felix A. Gers, Jürgen Schmidhuber and Fred Cummins introduced adaptive forgetting to handle continuing streams where a memory needs to be reset rather than preserved indefinitely. The direct memory-path derivative contains products of forget gates; the full recurrent derivative also includes dependencies through other states and gates.[ref]
Learning to Forget: Continual Prediction with LSTM by Felix A. Gers, Jürgen Schmidhuber and Fred Cummins. Abstract and adaptive forget-gate motivation for continual prediction.
Fred Cummins 2026-11-05
Fred Cummins is a researcher in cognitive science and speech whose work includes the timing of people speaking together. A2019speaker profile describes his empirical investigation of joint speech. His own publication list also confirms coauthorship of the2000long short-term memory forget-gate paper with Felix A. Gers and Jürgen Schmidhuber.[ref]
Fred Cummins speaker profile at Battle of Ideas 2019. Date-specific speaker biography and author publication-list cross-check
His2003study of synchronous speech asked pairs of readers to speak a prepared text together and measured their timing. Across the reported conditions, corresponding points were typically separated by about40milliseconds, with larger differences at phrase beginnings. Comparison conditions examined practice and visual access to the partner; both speakers adjusted their timing relative to individual control readings.[ref]
Practice and performance in speech produced synchronously by Fred Cummins. Abstract; Methods; synchrony and phrasal-position results
This supplies a concrete scientific question: is coordinated timing produced by one speaker simply trailing the other, or by mutual adjustment? Recording both voices and comparing them with individual readings can distinguish these accounts. The result concerns a structured reading task, rather than proving that every spontaneous crowd utterance follows the same timing rule.
Fred Cummins, identified on his2019speaker profile
. External portrait from Fred Cummins speaker profile at Battle of Ideas 2019. Jürgen Schmidhuber 2026-11-05
Jürgen Schmidhuber is a computer scientist whose research includes learning architectures for recurrent neural networks. He coauthored the1997long short-term memory paper with Sepp Hochreiter and the2000adaptive-forgetting paper with Felix A. Gers and Fred Cummins. These are team contributions documented by the original bylines.[ref] [ref] [ref]
The1997architecture separates a persistent internal state from learned control of access to that state. A LSTM input gate controls new input, while a LSTM output gate controls how stored information influences output. This arrangement was designed to reduce the vanishing gradient problem that makes distant events difficult to associate during learning.[ref]
Long Short-Term Memory by Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber. Abstract; Sections3–4: constant error flow and multiplicative gates
An illustrative task presents a marked value early in a long stream, then asks for it after many irrelevant inputs. A network needs both a way to retain the relevant information and a way to protect it from later interference. The paper tested artificial long-delay tasks; success on those experiments is evidence about the architecture and learning procedure under specified conditions, not a guarantee of unlimited or error-free memory.
Jürgen Schmidhuber, photograph linked from his author homepage
. External photograph identified in the Photos list of Jürgen Schmidhuber homepage.

