LaTIM: Measuring Latent Token-to-Token Interactions in Mamba Models
Authors: name: Hugo Pitorro; name: Marcos Treviso
Published: 2025-02-21 17:33:59

Abstract: State space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, have emerged as an efficient
alternative to transformers for long-context sequence modeling. However,
despite their growing adoption, SSMs lack the interpretability tools that have
been crucial for understanding and improving attention-based architectures.
While recent efforts provide insights into Mamba's internal mechanisms, they do
not explicitly decompose token-wise contributions, leaving gaps in
understanding how Mamba selectively processes sequences across layers. In this
work, we introduce LaTIM, a novel token-level decomposition method for both
Mamba-1 and Mamba-2 that enables fine-grained interpretability. We extensively
evaluate our method across diverse tasks, including machine translation,
copying, and retrieval-based generation, demonstrating its effectiveness in
revealing Mamba's token-to-token interaction patterns.