Neural Foundations · 2014

Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks

Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le

Introduced a general end-to-end LSTM encoder-decoder that maps an input sequence to a fixed-length vector and decodes it into an output sequence, removing the need for fixed-alignment, feature-engineered pipelines in sequence transduction.

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The paper used one multilayer LSTM to read an entire source sentence into a single vector and a second LSTM to generate the target sentence from that vector. A key practical trick was reversing the order of source words, which shortened the average distance between corresponding input and output tokens and made optimization easier, pushing WMT'14 English-to-French BLEU to competitive levels. It showed that a purely neural, general-purpose sequence model could rival phrase-based statistical MT and became the template for later encoder-decoder systems.

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Record ID
A-006
Record created
2026-07-13
Last reviewed
2026-07-14
Record version
2

Citation caveat: Citation metadata is approximate and marked unverified in the source dataset.