  Theoretical and empirical evidence indicates that the depth of neural
networks is crucial for their success. However, training becomes more difficult
as depth increases, and training of very deep networks remains an open problem.
Here we introduce a new architecture designed to overcome this. Our so-called
highway networks allow unimpeded information flow across many layers on
information highways. They are inspired by Long Short-Term Memory recurrent
networks and use adaptive gating units to regulate the information flow. Even
with hundreds of layers, highway networks can be trained directly through
simple gradient descent. This enables the study of extremely deep and efficient
architectures.
