Flash PD-SSM: Memory-Optimized Structured Sparse State-Space Models

Abstract: State-space models (SSMs) face a fundamental trade-off between efficiency and expressivity that is mainly dictated by the structure of the model's transition matrix. Unstructured transition matrices enable maximal expressivity, as measured by their ability to model finite-state automaton (FSA) transitions, but come at a prohibitively high compute and memory cost. In contrast, most structured transition matrix forms are highly efficient both in runtime and memory consumption, but suffer from limited expressivity. Building on recent work on structured sparse SSMs, we propose Flash PD-SSM, a novel SSM that achieves comparable throughput to widely-used structured SSMs with significantly better expressivity guarantees. Flash PD-SSM maintains a trainable set of structured sparse matrices, a single one of which is discretely selected at each time-step, enabling FSA expressiveness at the level of unstructured matrices while maintaining the efficiency required for training models at scale. First, we validate Flash PD-SSM against a suite of alternative models on synthetic mechanistic and state-tracking tasks, finding that its theoretical expressivity is achieved in practice. Second, on multivariate time-series tasks involving sequences of length over 17,000, we find that Flash PD-SSM defines a new state-of-the-art (SoTA) accuracy among competing SSM methods. Finally, we demonstrate that Flash PD-SSM is an effective drop-in replacement for hybrid LLMs, yielding improvements both in natural language state-tracking and in common language modeling scenarios. The model exhibits increased throughput and decreased memory consumption compared to SSMs widely used in frontier LLMs.