A Theoretical Analysis of Mamba’s Training Dynamics: Filtering Relevant Features for Generalization in State Space Models

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission19648 Authors

Keywords: Training Dynamics, Feature Learning, Generalization, Mamba, Learning Theory, Selective State Space Models

Abstract:

The recent empirical success of Mamba and other selective state space models (SSMs) has renewed interest in non-attention architectures for sequence modeling, yet their theoretical foundations remain underexplored. We present a first-step analysis of generalization and learning dynamics for a simplified but representative Mamba block: a single-layer, single-head selective SSM with input-dependent gating, followed by a two-layer MLP trained via SGD. Our study adopts a structured data model with tokens that include both class-relevant and class-irrelevant patterns under token-level noise and examines two canonical regimes: majority-voting and concentration-type sequences. We prove that the model achieves guaranteed generalization by establishing asymptotic sample complexity and convergence rate bounds, which improve as the effective signal increases and the noise decreases.
Furthermore, we show that the gating vector aligns with class-relevant features while ignoring irrelevant ones, thereby formalizing a feature-selection role similar to attention but realized through selective recurrence. Numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world data justify our theoretical results. Overall, our results provide principled insight into when and why Mamba-style selective SSMs learn efficiently, offering a theoretical counterpoint to Transformer-centric explanations.

Primary Area: learning theory

Submission Number: 19648