The Effect of Depth on the Expressivity of Deep Linear State-Space Models

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission17007 Authors

Keywords: Deep Linear State-Space Model; Sequence Modeling; Learning Theory

Abstract: Deep state-space models (SSMs) have gained increasing popularity in sequence modelling. While there are numerous theoretical investigations of shallow SSMs, how the depth of the SSM affects its expressiveness remains a crucial problem. In this paper, we systematically investigate the role of depth and width in deep linear SSMs, aiming to characterize how they influence the expressive capacity of the architecture. First, we rigorously prove that in the absence of parameter constraints, increasing depth and increasing width are generally equivalent, provided that the parameter count remains within the same order of magnitude. However, under the assumption that the parameter norms are constrained, the effects of depth and width differ significantly. We show that a shallow linear SSM with large parameter norms can be represented by a deep linear SSM with smaller norms using a constructive method. In particular, this demonstrates that deep SSMs are more capable of representing targets with large norms than shallow SSMs under norm constraints. Finally, we derive upper bounds on the minimal depth required for a deep linear SSM to represent a given shallow linear SSM under constrained parameter norms. We also validate our theoretical results with numerical experiments.

Primary Area: learning theory

Submission Number: 17007