The document discusses the vanishing/exploding gradient problem in training deep networks and the introduction of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to address this issue by incorporating gating mechanisms. LSTM networks allow for better retention of information over longer periods and can handle long-distance dependencies in tasks such as sequence labeling and language modeling. Additionally, it mentions the use of bi-directional LSTMs, Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs), and the application of attention mechanisms to further improve RNNs in various tasks including image captioning and machine translation.