  Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) infers the long term dependency through a cell
state maintained by the input and the forget gate structures, which models a
gate output as a value in [0,1] through a sigmoid function. However, due to the
graduality of the sigmoid function, the sigmoid gate is not flexible in
representing multi-modality or skewness. Besides, the previous models lack
modeling on the correlation between the gates, which would be a new method to
adopt inductive bias for a relationship between previous and current input.
This paper proposes a new gate structure with the bivariate Beta distribution.
The proposed gate structure enables probabilistic modeling on the gates within
the LSTM cell so that the modelers can customize the cell state flow with
priors and distributions. Moreover, we theoretically show the higher upper
bound of the gradient compared to the sigmoid function, and we empirically
observed that the bivariate Beta distribution gate structure provides higher
gradient values in training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of bivariate Beta
gate structure on the sentence classification, image classification, polyphonic
music modeling, and image caption generation.
