How to use multilayered bidirectional LSTM in Tensorflow?

Question

I want to know how to use multilayered bidirectional LSTM in Tensorflow.

I have already implemented the contents of bidirectional LSTM, but I wanna compare this model wi

Answer 1

As @Taras pointed out, you can use:

(1) tf.nn.bidirectional_dynamic_rnn()

(2) tf.contrib.rnn.stack_bidirectional_dynamic_rnn().

All previous answers only capture (1), so I give some details on (2), in particular since it usually outperforms (1). For an intuition about the different connectivities see here.

Let's say you want to create a stack of 3 BLSTM layers, each with 64 nodes:

num_layers = 3
num_nodes = 64


# Define LSTM cells
enc_fw_cells = [LSTMCell(num_nodes)for layer in range(num_layers)]
enc_bw_cells = [LSTMCell(num_nodes) for layer in range(num_layers)]

# Connect LSTM cells bidirectionally and stack
(all_states, fw_state, bw_state) = tf.contrib.rnn.stack_bidirectional_dynamic_rnn(
        cells_fw=enc_fw_cells, cells_bw=enc_bw_cells, inputs=input_embed, dtype=tf.float32)

# Concatenate results
for k in range(num_layers):
    if k == 0:
        con_c = tf.concat((fw_state[k].c, bw_state[k].c), 1)
        con_h = tf.concat((fw_state[k].h, bw_state[k].h), 1)
    else:
        con_c = tf.concat((con_c, fw_state[k].c, bw_state[k].c), 1)
        con_h = tf.concat((con_h, fw_state[k].h, bw_state[k].h), 1)

output = tf.contrib.rnn.LSTMStateTuple(c=con_c, h=con_h)

In this case, I use the final states of the stacked biRNN rather than the states at all timesteps (saved in all_states), since I was using an encoding decoding scheme, where the above code was only the encoder.