Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces
Introduces Mamba, an attention-free selective state space model for linear-time sequence modeling across language, audio, and genomics.
Most foundation models rely on the Transformer's attention module, while subquadratic alternatives like structured state space models (SSMs) have lagged on language. The authors trace this to weak content-based reasoning and let SSM parameters depend on the input, so the model selectively propagates or forgets information per token. A hardware-aware parallel algorithm and a simplified attention- and MLP-free design yield Mamba, which offers fast inference, linear scaling, and state-of-the-art results across modalities; Mamba-3B matches Transformers twice its size.
Based on: Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces · arXiv.org