What is Constant error carousel?

The constant error carousel, also known as the vanishing gradient problem, refers to the issue where the gradients calculated during backpropagation in RNNs diminish or explode as they propagate back through time. This can lead to difficulties in learning long-term dependencies in sequential data.

LSTM cells were specifically designed to mitigate the vanishing gradient problem and allow for the effective learning of long-term dependencies. They achieve this through the use of gating mechanisms that control the flow of information inside the cell.

The gating mechanisms in LSTM cells, such as the forget gate and input gate, enable the cells to selectively retain or discard information from previous time steps. This selective information flow helps prevent the gradients from vanishing or exploding during training, allowing the network to effectively capture and utilize long-term dependencies in the data.

By utilizing memory cells, input and forget gates, and carefully designed update equations, LSTM cells can maintain a constant error signal throughout the entire sequence. This allows them to capture and propagate gradients over long time horizons, effectively addressing the vanishing gradient problem.

So, to summarize, LSTM cells are specifically designed to overcome the vanishing gradient problem associated with traditional RNNs. They do not suffer from the constant error carousel issue and can effectively capture long-term dependencies in sequential data.