What's the difference between “hidden” and “output” in PyTorch LSTM?

Question

I\'m having trouble understanding the documentation for PyTorch\'s LSTM module (and also RNN and GRU, which are similar). Regarding the outputs, it says:

Answer 1

I made a diagram. The names follow the PyTorch docs, although I renamed num_layers to w.

output comprises all the hidden states in the last layer ("last" depth-wise, not time-wise). (h_n, c_n) comprises the hidden states after the last timestep, t = n, so you could potentially feed them into another LSTM.

The batch dimension is not included.