Pith. sign in

REVIEW 16 cited by

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2407.14207 v5 pith:WBLNDC4W submitted 2024-07-19 cs.LG

Longhorn: State Space Models are Amortized Online Learners

classification cs.LG
keywords onlinelonghornmodelingsequencessmslearningmodelsarchitecture
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

Modern large language models are built on sequence modeling via next-token prediction. While the Transformer remains the dominant architecture for sequence modeling, its quadratic decoding complexity in sequence length poses a major limitation. State-space models (SSMs) present a competitive alternative, offering linear decoding efficiency while maintaining parallelism during training. However, most existing SSMs rely on linear recurrence designs that appear somewhat ad hoc. In this work, we explore SSM design through the lens of online learning, conceptualizing SSMs as meta-modules for specific online learning problems. This approach links SSM design to formulating precise online learning objectives, with state transition rules derived from solving these objectives. Based on this insight, we introduce a novel deep SSM architecture, Longhorn, whose update resembles the closed-form solution for solving the online associative recall problem. Our experimental results show that Longhorn outperforms state-of-the-art SSMs, including the Mamba model, on standard sequence modeling benchmarks, language modeling, and vision tasks. Specifically, Longhorn achieves a 1.8x improvement in sample efficiency compared to Mamba, and can extrapolate over contexts that are up to 16x longer during inference.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 16 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Test-Time Training with KV Binding Is Secretly Linear Attention

    cs.LG 2026-02 conditional novelty 8.0

    Test-time training with KV binding reduces to learned linear attention.

  2. Tapered Language Models

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Tapered Language Models monotonically decrease MLP width across depth with a cosine schedule, yielding better perplexity and downstream performance than uniform-width baselines across multiple architectures and scales...

  3. Preconditioned DeltaNet: Curvature-aware Sequence Modeling for Linear Recurrences

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Preconditioned delta-rule models with a diagonal curvature approximation improve upon standard DeltaNet, GDN, and KDA by better approximating the test-time regression objective.

  4. The Key to Going Linear: Analysis-Driven Transformer Linearization

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Delta-rule linear attention faithfully approximates softmax attention through key-dependent rank-1 projections, enabling efficient post-hoc linearization of LLMs up to 32B parameters.

  5. Architecture-Aware Reinforcement Learning Makes Sliding-Window Attention Competitive in Math Reasoning

    cs.AI 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Reinforcement learning after SFT conversion narrows the performance gap between sliding-window attention and full self-attention on math reasoning benchmarks while preserving linear complexity.

  6. Memory by Design: Probabilistic Sequence Layers

    stat.ML 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    The design-model framework unifies sub-quadratic sequence models as Bayesian filters and introduces a covariance-tracking Bayesian Layer that improves retrieval robustness beyond training regimes on MQAR and RULER benchmarks.

  7. OSDN: Improving Delta Rule with Provable Online Preconditioning in Linear Attention

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    OSDN adds online diagonal preconditioning to the Delta Rule, preserving chunkwise parallelism while proving super-geometric convergence and delivering 32-39% recall gains at 340M-1.3B scales.

  8. Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture

    cs.CL 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Kimi Linear hybridizes linear attention with a new KDA module to beat full attention on tasks while slashing KV cache by 75% and speeding decoding up to 6x.

  9. Short window attention enables long-term memorization

    cs.LG 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Short sliding windows in hybrid attention-xLSTM models boost long-context performance by encouraging long-term memory use, and stochastic window sizing improves both short and long tasks.

  10. Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Time

    cs.LG 2024-12 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Titans combine attention for current context with a learnable neural memory for long-term history, achieving better performance and scaling to over 2M-token contexts on language, reasoning, genomics, and time-series tasks.

  11. Q-Delta: Beyond Key-Value Associative State Evolution

    cs.AI 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Q-Delta extends linear attention by introducing a query-conditioned delta rule that incorporates mixed key-query errors into recurrent state updates for improved stability and performance.

  12. Kaczmarz Linear Attention

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Kaczmarz Linear Attention replaces the empirical coefficient in Gated DeltaNet with a key-norm-normalized step size derived from the online regression objective, yielding lower perplexity and better needle-in-haystack...

  13. MDN: Parallelizing Stepwise Momentum for Delta Linear Attention

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    MDN parallelizes stepwise momentum for delta linear attention using geometric reordering and dynamical systems analysis, yielding performance gains over Mamba2 and GDN on 400M and 1.3B models.

  14. FG$^2$-GDN: Enhancing Long-Context Gated Delta Networks with Doubly Fine-Grained Control

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    FG²-GDN replaces the scalar beta in the delta update with a channel-wise vector and decouples key/value scaling to improve recall over prior GDN and KDA models.

  15. TTT3R: 3D Reconstruction as Test-Time Training

    cs.CV 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    TTT3R derives a closed-form learning rate from memory-observation alignment confidence to boost length generalization in RNN-based 3D reconstruction by 2x in global pose estimation.

  16. Gated Delta Networks: Improving Mamba2 with Delta Rule

    cs.CL 2024-12 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Gated DeltaNet integrates gating and delta rules into linear transformers, outperforming Mamba2 and DeltaNet on language modeling, reasoning, retrieval, and long-context tasks.