Paper:
Recurrent neural networks like long short-term memory (LSTM) are important architectures for sequential prediction tasks. LSTMs (and RNNs in general) model sequences along the forward time direction. Bidirectional LSTMs (Bi-LSTMs), which model sequences along both forward and backward directions, generally perform better at such tasks because they capture a richer representation of the data. In the training of Bi-LSTMs, the forward and backward paths are learned independently. We propose a variant of the Bi-LSTM architecture, which we call Variational Bi-LSTM, that creates a dependence between the two paths (during training, but which may be omitted during inference). Our model acts as a regularizer and encourages the two networks to inform each other in making their respective predictions using distinct information. We perform ablation studies to better understand the different components of our model and evaluate the method on various benchmarks, showing state-of-the-art performance.

Review:
*Quality*
The paper is easy to parse, with clear diagrams and derivations at the start. The problem context is clearly stated, as is the proposed model.
The improvements in terms of average log-likelihood are clear. The model does improve over state-of-the-art in some cases, but not all.
Based on the presented findings, it is difficult to determine the quality of the learned models overall, since they are only evaluated in terms of average log likelihood. It is also difficult to determine whether the improvements are due to the model change, or some difference in how the models themselves were trained (particularly in the case of Z-Forcing, a closely related technique). I would like to see more exploration of this point, as the section titled “ablation studies” is short and does not sufficiently address the issue of what component of the model is contributing to the observed improvements in average log-likelihood.
Hence, I have assigned a score of "4" for the following reasons: the quality of the generated models is unclear; the paper does not clearly distinguish itself from the closely-related Z-Forcing concept (published at NIPS 2017); and the reasons for the improvements shown in average log-likelihood are not explored sufficiently, that is, the ablation studies don't eliminate key parts of the model that could provide this information.
More information on this decision is given in the remainder.
*Clarity*
A lack of generated samples in the Experimental Results section makes it difficult to evaluate the performance of the models; log-likelihood alone can be an inadequate measure of performance without some care in how it is calculated and interpreted (refer, e.g., to Theis et al. 2016, “A Note on the Evaluation of Generative Models”).
There are some typos and organizational issues. For example, VAEs are reintroduced in the Related Works section, only to provide an explanation for an unrelated optimization challenge with the use of RNNs as encoders and decoders.
I also find the motivations for the proposed model itself a little unclear. It seems unnatural to introduce a side-channel-cum-regularizer between a sequence moving forward in time and the same sequence moving backwards, through a variational distribution. In the introduction, improved regularization for LSTM models is cited as a primary motivation for introducing and learning two approximate distributions for latent variables between the forward and backward paths of a bi-LSTM. Is there a serious need for new regularization in such models? The need for this particular regularization choice is not particularly clear based on this explanation, nor are the improvements state-of-the-art in all cases. This weakens a possible theoretical contribution of the paper.
*Originality*
The proposed modification appears to amount to a regularizer for bi-LSTMs which bears close similarity to Z-Forcing (cited in the paper). I recommend a more careful comparison between the two methods. Without such a comparison, they are a little hard to distinguish, and the originality of this paper is hard to evaluate. Both appear to employ the same core idea of regularizing an LSTM using a learned variational distributions. The differences *seem* to be in the small details, and these details appear to provide better performance in terms of average log-likelihood on all tasks compared to Z-Forcing--but, crucially, not compared to other models in all cases.