Unfortunately what you want to do is impossible with Keras … I’ve also struggle a lot of time on this problems and the only way is to dive into the rabbit hole and work with Tensorflow directly to do LSTM rolling prediction.
First, to be clear on terminology, batch_size usually means number of sequences that are trained together, and num_steps means how many time steps are trained together. When you mean batch_size=1 and “just predicting the next value”, I think you meant to predict with num_steps=1.
Otherwise, it should be possible to train and predict with batch_size=50 meaning you are training on 50 sequences and make 50 predictions every time step, one for each sequence (meaning training/prediction num_steps=1).
However, I think what you mean is that you want to use stateful LSTM to train with num_steps=50 and do prediction with num_steps=1. Theoretically this make senses and should be possible, and it is possible with Tensorflow, just not Keras.
The problem: Keras requires an explicit batch size for stateful RNN. You must specify batch_input_shape (batch_size, num_steps, features).
The reason: Keras must allocate a fixed-size hidden state vector in the computation graph with shape (batch_size, num_units) in order to persist the values between training batches. On the other hand, when stateful=False, the hidden state vector can be initialized dynamically with zeroes at the beginning of each batch so it does not need to be a fixed size. More details here: http://philipperemy.github.io/keras-stateful-lstm/
Possible work around: Train and predict with num_steps=1. Example: https://github.com/keras-team/keras/blob/master/examples/lstm_stateful.py. This might or might not work at all for your problem as the gradient for back propagation will be computed on only one time step. See: https://github.com/fchollet/keras/issues/3669
My solution: use Tensorflow: In Tensorflow you can train with batch_size=50, num_steps=100, then do predictions with batch_size=1, num_steps=1. This is possible by creating a different model graph for training and prediction sharing the same RNN weight matrices. See this example for next-character prediction: https://github.com/sherjilozair/char-rnn-tensorflow/blob/master/model.py#L11 and blog post http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/. Note that one graph can still only work with one specified batch_size, but you can setup multiple model graphs sharing weights in Tensorflow.