  End-to-end trained Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been successfully
applied to numerous problems that require processing sequences, such as image
captioning, machine translation, and text recognition. However, RNNs often
struggle to generalise to sequences longer than the ones encountered during
training. In this work, we propose to optimise neural networks explicitly for
induction. The idea is to first decompose the problem in a sequence of
inductive steps and then to explicitly train the RNN to reproduce such steps.
Generalisation is achieved as the RNN is not allowed to learn an arbitrary
internal state; instead, it is tasked with mimicking the evolution of a valid
state. In particular, the state is restricted to a spatial memory map that
tracks parts of the input image which have been accounted for in previous
steps. The RNN is trained for single inductive steps, where it produces updates
to the memory in addition to the desired output. We evaluate our method on two
different visual recognition problems involving visual sequences: (1) text
spotting, i.e. joint localisation and reading of text in images containing
multiple lines (or a block) of text, and (2) sequential counting of objects in
aerial images. We show that inductive training of recurrent models enhances
their generalisation ability on challenging image datasets.
