LSTM architecture aims to provide RNNs with long short-term memory using a cell state and three gates: the input gate determines how the next internal state is influenced by the input; the forget gate determines how it's influenced by the last internal state; and the output gate determines how the output is influenced by the internal state. LSTM has made significant contributions to machine learning by handling long-term dependencies, enabling state-of-the-art performance on tasks like speech recognition, language translation, and image captioning. It has been applied successfully in these and other areas by modeling temporal dynamics in speech and capturing complex relationships in data sequences.