Gated recurrent units (GRUs) are a gating mechanism in recurrent neural networks, introduced in 2014 by Kyunghyun Cho et al.[1] The GRU is like a long short-term memory (LSTM) with a gating mechanism to input or forget certain features,[2] but lacks a context vector or output gate, resulting in fewer parameters than LSTM.[3]
GRU's performance on certain tasks of polyphonic music modeling, speech signal modeling and natural language processing was found to be similar to that of LSTM.[4][5] GRUs showed that gating is indeed helpful in general, and Bengio's team came to no concrete conclusion on which of the two gating units was better.[6][7]