Understanding and Mitigating Bottlenecks of State Space Models through
  the Lens of Recency and Over-smoothing
Authors: name: Peihao Wang; name: Ruisi Cai; name: Yuehao Wang; name: Jiajun Zhu; name: Pragya Srivastava; name: Zhangyang Wang; name: Pan Li
Published: 2024-12-31 22:06:39

Abstract: Structured State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as alternatives to
transformers. While SSMs are often regarded as effective in capturing
long-sequence dependencies, we rigorously demonstrate that they are inherently
limited by strong recency bias. Our empirical studies also reveal that this
bias impairs the models' ability to recall distant information and introduces
robustness issues. Our scaling experiments then discovered that deeper
structures in SSMs can facilitate the learning of long contexts. However,
subsequent theoretical analysis reveals that as SSMs increase in depth, they
exhibit another inevitable tendency toward over-smoothing, e.g., token
representations becoming increasingly indistinguishable. This fundamental
dilemma between recency and over-smoothing hinders the scalability of existing
SSMs. Inspired by our theoretical findings, we propose to polarize two channels
of the state transition matrices in SSMs, setting them to zero and one,
respectively, simultaneously addressing recency bias and over-smoothing.
Experiments demonstrate that our polarization technique consistently enhances
the associative recall accuracy of long-range tokens and unlocks SSMs to
benefit further from deeper architectures. All source codes are released at
https://github.com/VITA-Group/SSM-Bottleneck.