状态空间模型（SSMs）的门控机制：记忆与情境学习研究
On the Importance of Gating: Memorization vs. In-Context Learning in State Space Models
状态空间模型（SSMs）在情境学习和精确检索任务上落后于 Transformer，其门控机制导致其先学习记忆解决方案，延迟或阻止正确情境学习解决方案的收敛，但门控机制对改善长序列泛化有益。
AuthorsWilliam L. Tong†**, Aryo Lotfi, Emmanuel Abbe, Kostas Vaggelakos, Vishnu Banna, Etai Littwin, Josh Susskind, Cengiz Pehlevan†, Eran Malach
State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as a compelling alternative to Transformers, enabling sequence modeling with constant memory and linear compute. Although SSMs exhibit reasonable performance and favorable computational characteristics, they continue to lag behind Transformers on tasks that require in-context learning and precise retrieval, slowing their adoption for large-scale language modeling. In this work, we demonstrate that both the success and failure of SSMs in these domains can be explained by studying the role of the gating mechanism, a prevalent component in modern recurrent networks. Specifically, we show through theory and experiments that this gating mechanism causes SSMs to first learn an in-weights “memorization” solution, while delaying, or even preventing, convergence to a correct in-context learning solution. Importantly, this happens even in cases where there are no fundamental limitations due to the architecture or its memory capacity. On the other hand, we find that gating is often beneficial for improving generalization to long sequence lengths. Our results illuminate the crucial role of the gating mechanism in shaping both the training dynamics and generalization of SSMs, and provide a basis for understanding and improving linear-time models.
- † Harvard University
- ** Work done while at Apple
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来源: Apple Machine Learning Research · machinelearning.apple.com