What's the difference between a bidirectional LSTM and an LSTM?

Question

Can someone please explain this? I know bidirectional LSTMs have a forward and backward pass but what is the advantage of this over a unidirectional LSTM?

What is each o

Answer 1

Adding to Bluesummer's answer, here is how you would implement Bidirectional LSTM from scratch without calling BiLSTM module. This might better contrast the difference between a uni-directional and bi-directional LSTMs. As you see, we merge two LSTMs to create a bidirectional LSTM.

You can merge outputs of the forward and backward LSTMs by using either {'sum', 'mul', 'concat', 'ave'}.

left = Sequential()
left.add(LSTM(output_dim=hidden_units, init='uniform', inner_init='uniform',
               forget_bias_init='one', return_sequences=True, activation='tanh',
               inner_activation='sigmoid', input_shape=(99, 13)))
right = Sequential()
right.add(LSTM(output_dim=hidden_units, init='uniform', inner_init='uniform',
               forget_bias_init='one', return_sequences=True, activation='tanh',
               inner_activation='sigmoid', input_shape=(99, 13), go_backwards=True))

model = Sequential()
model.add(Merge([left, right], mode='sum'))

model.add(TimeDistributedDense(nb_classes))
model.add(Activation('softmax'))

sgd = SGD(lr=0.1, decay=1e-5, momentum=0.9, nesterov=True)
model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer=sgd)
print("Train...")
model.fit([X_train, X_train], Y_train, batch_size=1, nb_epoch=nb_epoches, validation_data=([X_test, X_test], Y_test), verbose=1, show_accuracy=True)