After a lot of struggling, I was able to implement a version of an autoencoder that uses an LSTM’s final hidden state as the encoding.
It trains with a pretty loss curve:

but the decoder just outputs the average of the sequence (after a warm-up):

I’m wondering what could be causing this kind of behavior in an autoencoder?
Encoder Class:
class SeqEncoderLSTM(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, n_features, latent_size):
        super(SeqEncoderLSTM, self).__init__()
        
        self.lstm = nn.LSTM(
            n_features, 
            latent_size, 
            batch_first=True)
        
    def forward(self, x):
        _, hs = self.lstm(x)
        return hs

Decoder class:
class SeqDecoderLSTM(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, emb_size, n_features):
        super(SeqDecoderLSTM, self).__init__()
        
        self.cell = nn.LSTMCell(n_features, emb_size)
        self.dense = nn.Linear(emb_size, n_features)
        
    def forward(self, hs_0, seq_len):
        
        # add each point to the sequence as it's reconstructed
        x = torch.tensor([])
        
        # Final hidden and cell state from encoder
        hs_i, cs_i = hs_0
        
        # reconstruct first (last) element
        x_i = self.dense(hs_i)
        x = torch.cat([x, x_i])
        
        # reconstruct remaining elements
        for i in range(1, seq_len):
            hs_i, cs_i = self.cell(x_i, (hs_i, cs_i))
            x_i = self.dense(hs_i)
            x = torch.cat([x, x_i])
        
        return x

Bringing the two together:

class LSTMEncoderDecoder(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, n_features, emb_size):
        super(LSTMEncoderDecoder, self).__init__()
        self.n_features = n_features
        self.hidden_size = emb_size

        self.encoder = SeqEncoderLSTM(n_features, emb_size)
        self.decoder = SeqDecoderLSTM(emb_size, n_features)
    
    def forward(self, x):
        seq_len = x.shape[1]
        hs = self.encoder(x)
        hs = tuple([h.squeeze(0) for h in hs])
        out = self.decoder(hs, seq_len)
        return out.unsqueeze(0)