# Multi-range Reasoning for Machine Comprehension

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09074 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09074/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ChatSUMO: Large Language Model for Automating Traffic Scenario Generation in Simulation of Urban MObility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09040/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose MRU (Multi-Range Reasoning Units), a new fast compositional encoder for machine comprehension (MC). Our proposed MRU encoders are characterized by multi-ranged gating, executing a series of parameterized contract-and-expand layers for learning gating vectors that benefit from long and short-term dependencies. The aims of our approach are as follows: (1) learning representations that are concurrently aware of long and short-term context, (2) modeling relationships between intra-document blocks and (3) fast and efficient sequence encoding. We show that our proposed encoder demonstrates promising results both as a standalone encoder and as well as a complementary building block. We conduct extensive experiments on three challenging MC datasets, namely RACE, SearchQA and NarrativeQA, achieving highly competitive performance on all. On the RACE benchmark, our model outperforms DFN (Dynamic Fusion Networks) by 1.5%-6% without using any recurrent or convolution layers. Similarly, we achieve competitive performance relative to AMANDA on the SearchQA benchmark and BiDAF on the NarrativeQA benchmark without using any LSTM/GRU layers. Finally, incorporating MRU encoders with standard BiLSTM architectures further improves performance, achieving state-of-the-art results.
