There are many resources on how to obtain c and h from your LSTM. It has both returns set to true, and I'm storing h and c in variables as you can see in the code below. This is during inference after training the network. The encoder half of my model should be spitting out h and c with length hidden_dim, but as you'll see below that is not the case:
self.enc1 = LSTM(hidden_dim, return_sequences=True, return_state=True, name='enc1')
self.emb_A = Embedding(output_dim = emb_dim, input_dim = vocabulary, input_length = None, mask_zero=True, name='embA')
...
inference_encInput = Input(shape=(None,), dtype="int32", name="input_seq")
temp = self.emb_A(inference_encInput)
temp, h, c = self.enc1(temp)
encoder_states = [h, c]
enc_model = Model(inputs = inference_encInput, outputs = encoder_states)
...
predicted_states = enc_model.predict(indices_arr)
print("encoder states are "+str(predicted_states))
The result of that print statement is:
encoder states are [array([[-0.3114952 , -0.19627409],
[ 0.16007528, 0.72028404],
[-0.7607165 , 0.5128824 ]], dtype=float32), array([[-0.8645954 , -0.90217674],
[ 0.31057465, 0.9236232 ],
[-0.99791354, 0.99934816]], dtype=float32)]
My hidden dimension is only 2 because I'm just doing basic testing on extremely simple training data. The number of 2 dimensional vectors is always the same as the length of the sequence I'm trying to encode, in this case 3, which suggests that I'm somehow getting a sequence of states maybe? But h and c are just supposed to be the FINAL hidden and cell state. I don't think just taking the last one is correct either, there must be something else going on. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong here, especially since the state of the decoder is obtained correctly on each timestep:
new states for decoder are [array([[ 0.19158483, -0.16113694]], dtype=float32), array([[ 0.19398187, -0.37419504]], dtype=float32)]