How to Master LLMs — Part 3 Understanding LSTMs: Making Machines Remember

Welcome to Part 3 of the series on mastering Large Language Models (LLMs) through foundational research papers. If you’ve been following along, we started with Turing’s (1950) paper on machine intelligence, where we introduced the core idea of whether machines can think. In Part 2, we explored the breakthrough of backpropagation from Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams (1986), which showed how machines learn by adjusting their parameters based on errors. Today, we’ll dive into another crucial development: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks.

Find the Paper Here: [LSTM by Hochreiter & Schmidhuber (1997)](https://www.bioinf.jku.at/publications/older/2604.pdf)

Introducing LSTMs: Teaching Networks to Remember

LSTMs were developed to address a major issue in traditional neural networks: the inability to remember important information over long sequences. Let’s explore what this means and how LSTMs solved this problem, building on the concept of backpropagation.

The Problem: Forgetting Over Long Sequences

Traditional neural networks, and even early versions of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), struggled with long-term dependencies. For example, if you were reading a paragraph and the key detail was at the beginning, these networks might “forget” it by the time they reached the end. This issue arises because RNNs use the same set of weights to process each step of a sequence, leading to problems like the "vanishing gradient" during training.

Vanishing Gradient: In backpropagation, gradients (which help adjust the model’s parameters) get smaller as they propagate backward through layers. For RNNs handling long sequences, the gradients often shrink too much, causing earlier layers to barely update. This makes it hard for the network to remember information over extended time intervals.

This limitation is a major challenge for tasks like speech recognition, language translation, and financial time series forecasting, where the current output depends on earlier data points. Without a way to handle long-term dependencies, traditional RNNs were inadequate for these tasks.

LSTMs: The Solution

LSTMs, or Long Short-Term Memory networks, introduced a way to handle long-term dependencies effectively. They did this by adding a special kind of memory cell that can selectively remember or forget information. This allows LSTMs to store crucial information over extended periods, unlike traditional RNNs.

An LSTM cell has three main components, or “gates”:

1. Forget Gate: Decides what information to discard from the memory.

2. Input Gate: Determines what new information to add to the memory.

3. Output Gate: Controls the output based on the updated memory.

These gates make LSTMs capable of retaining relevant information for a long time while discarding what’s unnecessary, much like a person taking notes during a lecture, choosing to keep essential points and ignoring irrelevant details.

How LSTMs Work: A Simple Analogy

Think of an LSTM network like a person with a notepad:

1. When they start reading a book, they note down important details on their notepad (memory cell).

2. As they continue, they decide what information is still relevant and what can be erased (forget gate).

3. If they come across something they need to remember for later, they write it down (input gate) and refer back to it whenever needed (output gate).

Traditional RNNs, by contrast, would often struggle because they lack this "notepad" and might forget crucial details by the end of the book. The combination of these gates in LSTMs ensures that essential information is retained and unimportant details are discarded, allowing the network to focus on what matters.

Backpropagation to LSTM

The innovation of LSTMs would not be possible without backpropagation through time (BPTT), which is an adaptation of backpropagation for sequence data. In BPTT, the model learns by comparing the predicted output at each time step to the actual output, calculating the error, and adjusting the weights accordingly.

LSTMs mitigate the vanishing gradient problem faced by traditional RNNs:

Traditional RNNs: Gradients shrink as they propagate backward, leading to weak learning for earlier inputs in long sequences.

LSTMs: The memory cell and gate mechanism ensure that important gradients are maintained, allowing the network to learn dependencies over long sequences effectively. This is how LSTMs can remember information over many time steps, something that traditional RNNs could not achieve.

Real-World Examples of LSTMs in Action

1. Voice-to-Text Applications: When you speak a long sentence to your phone, it uses LSTMs to remember the context of your words and convert them into text accurately. Without LSTMs, the system might forget earlier words and misinterpret the sentence.
2. Predictive Text: When you type a message, your phone suggests the next word. This depends on LSTMs to remember what you've already typed, allowing the phone to predict the most relevant next word based on context.
3. Machine Translation: Translating a sentence from one language to another requires maintaining the context throughout the sentence. LSTMs help by retaining information across the entire sentence, ensuring the translation makes sense and captures the original meaning.
4. Music Composition: LSTMs have been used to compose music by analyzing sequences of notes. Just like remembering parts of a melody, an LSTM can generate a harmonious sequence by keeping track of previous notes.
5. Time Series Analysis: In stock market prediction, LSTMs can analyze sequences of past prices to predict future trends. They do this by learning patterns in the data and remembering important shifts over time, just as a human analyst might.
6. Sentiment Analysis: LSTMs are utilized to analyze customer reviews and determine sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral). By processing the entire review, LSTMs can retain contextual information that helps classify the sentiment accurately.
7. Speech Recognition: When transcribing spoken language, LSTMs maintain context and meaning over longer audio clips, ensuring that the output captures the essence of what was said, even if the key details are mentioned later in the conversation.
8. Chatbots: In conversational agents, LSTMs help maintain context across multiple turns in a dialogue, allowing the chatbot to understand user queries better and provide relevant responses based on prior interactions.
9. Video Analysis: In video processing, LSTMs can analyze sequences of frames to recognize actions or events, maintaining context to understand what is happening throughout the video.
10. Health Monitoring: In medical applications, LSTMs can analyze sequences of patient data over time (like heart rate or blood pressure) to predict health events, helping in early detection of issues based on historical data.

The Impact of LSTMs on LLMs

1. Foundation for Sequence Processing: LSTMs were a fundamental step in enabling machines to process and understand sequential data. This capability was critical for tasks like natural language understanding and speech processing, leading to more advanced models like Transformers—the architecture behind today’s Large Language Models (LLMs).

2. Advancing Natural Language Processing (NLP): LSTMs enabled neural networks to understand and generate more human-like text, which was a significant leap for tasks like chatbots, language translation, and voice assistants. They paved the way for more sophisticated LLMs by helping machines handle not just individual words, but entire sentences and paragraphs, capturing nuances and context more effectively.

Conclusion

The development of LSTMs was a major milestone in AI because it provided a solution to the problem of retaining context over long sequences. This capability allowed machines to understand language better, paving the way for more sophisticated models that could generate and interpret human-like text. Without LSTMs, the advanced language models we see today would not have been possible.

Want to learn more? Read the original paper by Hochreiter & Schmidhuber (1997) here: [LSTM Paper](https://www.bioinf.jku.at/publications/older/2604.pdf)

Previous Articles in This Series

Part 1: How to Master LLMs - Start by Understanding the Basics (Turing, 1950) - [Read here](https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/how-master-llms-part-1-start-understanding-kiran-kumar-katreddi-fi5cc/?trackingId=tcJKmURtQ7WoQNOIOGQ%2F2w%3D%3D)

Part 2: How to Master LLMs - Understanding Backpropagation and Its Role (Rumelhart, Hinton, Williams, 1986) - [Read here](https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/how-master-llms-part-2-understanding-backpropagation-its-katreddi-o0tge/)

Stay tuned for more insights on the evolution of AI and how to master LLMs. ????