Differential Mamba
Authors: name: Nadav Schneider; name: Itamar Zimerman; name: Eliya Nachmani
Published: 2025-07-08 17:30:14

Abstract: Sequence models like Transformers and RNNs often overallocate attention to
irrelevant context, leading to noisy intermediate representations. This
degrades LLM capabilities by promoting hallucinations, weakening long-range and
retrieval abilities, and reducing robustness. Recent work has shown that
differential design can mitigate this issue in Transformers, improving their
effectiveness across various applications. In this paper, we explore whether
these techniques, originally developed for Transformers, can be applied to
Mamba, a recent architecture based on selective state-space layers that
achieves Transformer-level performance with greater efficiency. We show that a
naive adaptation of differential design to Mamba is insufficient and requires
careful architectural modifications. To address this, we introduce a novel
differential mechanism for Mamba, empirically validated on language modeling
benchmarks, demonstrating improved retrieval capabilities and superior
performance over vanilla Mamba. Finally, we conduct extensive ablation studies
and empirical analyses to justify our design choices and provide evidence that
our approach effectively mitigates the overallocation problem in Mamba-based
models. Our code is publicly available.