A Quantitative Analysis of State Space Model-Based Large Language Model: Study of Hungry Hungry Hippos

Dongho Yoon, Taehun Kim, Jae W. Lee, Minsoo Rhu

Abstract: As the need for processing long contexts in large language models (LLMs) increases, attention-based LLMs face significant challenges due to their high computation and memory requirements. To overcome this challenge, there have been several recent works that seek to alleviate attention's system-level bottlenecks. An approach that has been receiving a lot of attraction lately is state space models (SSMs) thanks to their ability to substantially reduce computational complexity and memory footprint. Despite the excitement around SSMs, there is a lack of an in-depth characterization and analysis on this important model architecture. In this paper, we delve into a representative SSM named Hungry Hungry Hippos (H3), examining its advantages as well as its current limitations. We also discuss future research directions on improving the efficiency of SSMs via hardware architectural support.