PyTorch implementation of the adaptive LSTM (https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.08574), an extension of the standard LSTM that increases model flexibility through adaptive parameterization.

The aLSTM converges faster than the LSTM with superior generalizing performance. It is also stable; no need to use gradient clipping, even for sequences of up to thousands of terms. For more info, see the paper or the informal write up.

If you use this code or our results in your research, please cite

@article{Flennerhag:2018alstm,
  title   = {{Breaking the Activation Function Bottleneck through Adaptive Parameterization}},
  author  = {Flennerhag, Sebastian and Hujun, Yin and Keane, John and Elliot, Mark},
  journal = {{arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.08574}},
  year    = {2018}
}

This implementation should run on any PyTorch version. It has been tested for v2–v4. To install:

git clone https://github.com/flennerhag/alstm; cd alstm
python setup.py install

This implementation follows the LSTM implementation in the official (and constantly changing) PyTorch repo. You have an alstm_cell function and its aLSTMCell module wrapper. These apply to a given time step. The aLSTM class provides an end-user API with variational dropout and our hybrid RHN-LSTM adaptation model for multi-layer aLSTMs.

import torch
from torch.autograd import Variable
from alstm import aLSTM

seq_len, batch_size, input_size, hidden_size, adapt_size, output_size, = 20, 5, 8, 10, 3, 7

alstm = aLSTM(input_size, hidden_size, adapt_size, output_size, nlayers=2)

X = Variable(torch.rand(seq_len, batch_size, hidden_size))
out, hidden = alstm(X) 

To replicate the original experiments of the aLSTM paper see examples.

If you spot a bug, think the docs are useless or have an idea for an extension, don't hesitate to send a PR! If your contribution is substantial, please raise an issue first to check that it is in line with the scope of this repo. Quick wins that would be great to have are:

• Support for bidirectional aLSTM
• Support PyTorch's PackedSequence