r/MachineLearning - [P] Analyzing Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) Using Polymer Dynamics Theory

I'm learning RNN theory and as a project, I tried to better understand the dynamics of LSTM elements when applied to input strings by relating the dynamics to concepts I'm more familiar with in chemical nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. Identified some interesting behavior in terms of the relatively smaller impact of terminal pad characters on the element dynamics versus other characters which cause large changes in the element values. Details in the linked blog post. Assume this behavior is well known, but I wasn't able to find a publication that demonstrates this behavior. Would appreciate learning about prior related work that I should be citing.