  In this paper, we introduce a novel method to interpret recurrent neural
networks (RNNs), particularly long short-term memory networks (LSTMs) at the
cellular level. We propose a systematic pipeline for interpreting individual
hidden state dynamics within the network using response characterization
methods. The ranked contribution of individual cells to the network's output is
computed by analyzing a set of interpretable metrics of their decoupled step
and sinusoidal responses. As a result, our method is able to uniquely identify
neurons with insightful dynamics, quantify relationships between dynamical
properties and test accuracy through ablation analysis, and interpret the
impact of network capacity on a network's dynamical distribution. Finally, we
demonstrate generalizability and scalability of our method by evaluating a
series of different benchmark sequential datasets.
