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 with the model added multi-layers.

How should I add some code in this part?

x = tf.unstack(tf.transpose(x, perm=[1, 0, 2]))
#print(x[0].get_shape())

# Define lstm cells with tensorflow
# Forward direction cell
lstm_fw_cell = rnn.BasicLSTMCell(n_hidden, forget_bias=1.0)
# Backward direction cell
lstm_bw_cell = rnn.BasicLSTMCell(n_hidden, forget_bias=1.0)

# Get lstm cell output
try:
    outputs, _, _ = rnn.static_bidirectional_rnn(lstm_fw_cell, lstm_bw_cell, x,
                                          dtype=tf.float32)
except Exception: # Old TensorFlow version only returns outputs not states
    outputs = rnn.static_bidirectional_rnn(lstm_fw_cell, lstm_bw_cell, x,
                                    dtype=tf.float32)

# Linear activation, using rnn inner loop last output
outputs = tf.stack(outputs, axis=1)
outputs = tf.reshape(outputs, (batch_size*n_steps, n_hidden*2))
outputs = tf.matmul(outputs, weights['out']) + biases['out']
outputs = tf.reshape(outputs, (batch_size, n_steps, n_classes))

Answer 1

You can use two different approaches to apply multilayer bilstm model:

1) use out of previous bilstm layer as input to the next bilstm. In the beginning you should create the arrays with forward and backward cells of length num_layers. And

for n in range(num_layers):
        cell_fw = cell_forw[n]
        cell_bw = cell_back[n]

        state_fw = cell_fw.zero_state(batch_size, tf.float32)
        state_bw = cell_bw.zero_state(batch_size, tf.float32)

        (output_fw, output_bw), last_state = tf.nn.bidirectional_dynamic_rnn(cell_fw, cell_bw, output,
                                                                             initial_state_fw=state_fw,
                                                                             initial_state_bw=state_bw,
                                                                             scope='BLSTM_'+ str(n),
                                                                             dtype=tf.float32)

        output = tf.concat([output_fw, output_bw], axis=2)

2) Also worth a look at another approach stacked bilstm.

Answer 2

This is primarily same as the first answer but with a little variation of usage of scope name and with added dropout wrappers. It also takes care of the error the first answer gives about variable scope.

def bidirectional_lstm(input_data, num_layers, rnn_size, keep_prob):

    output = input_data
    for layer in range(num_layers):
        with tf.variable_scope('encoder_{}'.format(layer),reuse=tf.AUTO_REUSE):

            # By giving a different variable scope to each layer, I've ensured that
            # the weights are not shared among the layers. If you want to share the
            # weights, you can do that by giving variable_scope as "encoder" but do
            # make sure first that reuse is set to tf.AUTO_REUSE

            cell_fw = tf.contrib.rnn.LSTMCell(rnn_size, initializer=tf.truncated_normal_initializer(-0.1, 0.1, seed=2))
            cell_fw = tf.contrib.rnn.DropoutWrapper(cell_fw, input_keep_prob = keep_prob)

            cell_bw = tf.contrib.rnn.LSTMCell(rnn_size, initializer=tf.truncated_normal_initializer(-0.1, 0.1, seed=2))
            cell_bw = tf.contrib.rnn.DropoutWrapper(cell_bw, input_keep_prob = keep_prob)

            outputs, states = tf.nn.bidirectional_dynamic_rnn(cell_fw, 
                                                              cell_bw, 
                                                              output,
                                                              dtype=tf.float32)

            # Concat the forward and backward outputs
            output = tf.concat(outputs,2)

    return output

Answer 3

On top of Taras's answer. Here is another example using just 2-layer Bidirectional RNN with GRU cells

    embedding_weights = tf.Variable(tf.random_uniform([vocabulary_size, state_size], -1.0, 1.0))
    embedding_vectors = tf.nn.embedding_lookup(embedding_weights, tokens)

    #First BLSTM
    cell = tf.nn.rnn_cell.GRUCell(state_size)
    cell = tf.nn.rnn_cell.DropoutWrapper(cell, output_keep_prob=1-dropout)
    (forward_output, backward_output), _ = \
        tf.nn.bidirectional_dynamic_rnn(cell, cell, inputs=embedding_vectors,
                                        sequence_length=lengths, dtype=tf.float32,scope='BLSTM_1')
    outputs = tf.concat([forward_output, backward_output], axis=2)

    #Second BLSTM using the output of previous layer as an input.
    cell2 = tf.nn.rnn_cell.GRUCell(state_size)
    cell2 = tf.nn.rnn_cell.DropoutWrapper(cell2, output_keep_prob=1-dropout)
    (forward_output, backward_output), _ = \
        tf.nn.bidirectional_dynamic_rnn(cell2, cell2, inputs=outputs,
                                        sequence_length=lengths, dtype=tf.float32,scope='BLSTM_2')
    outputs = tf.concat([forward_output, backward_output], axis=2)

BTW, don't forget to add different scope name. Hope this help.

Answer 4

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.