LLM ArchitectureFoundations Updated 2026

LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory)

Definition

A recurrent neural network design with gating that can remember information over long sequences — the workhorse of sequence modelling before Transformers.

Hochreiter & Schmidhuber (1997) introduced the LSTM to solve the vanishing-gradient problem that prevented ordinary recurrent networks from learning long-range dependencies. Its gated memory cell lets information persist or be forgotten in a controlled way across many time steps.

LSTMs dominated speech, translation and text modelling for nearly two decades, until self-attention and the Transformer largely replaced them.

References

Primary, peer-reviewed and archival sources for this definition.

Long Short-Term Memory
Hochreiter, S., & Schmidhuber, J. (1997). Neural Computation, 9(8), 1735–1780.

Dictionary & encyclopedic entries

Cite this entry

MultipleChat. "LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory)." MultipleChat AI & LLM Glossary, 2026. https://multiple.chat/ai-glossary/lstm

Related terms

See this in practice

Run the same prompt across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity side by side — with your own files as context and answers you can cross-check.

Try MultipleChat Free

Continue learning

See paid plans