Bridging Expressivity and Scalability with Adaptive Unitary SSMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Karuvally, Arjun, Nowak, Franz, Keller, Anderson T., Alonso, Carmen Amo, Sejnowski, Terrence J., Siegelmann, Hava T.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Karuvally, Arjun
Nowak, Franz
Keller, Anderson T.
Alonso, Carmen Amo
Sejnowski, Terrence J.
Siegelmann, Hava T.
author_facet Karuvally, Arjun
Nowak, Franz
Keller, Anderson T.
Alonso, Carmen Amo
Sejnowski, Terrence J.
Siegelmann, Hava T.
contents Recent work has revealed that state space models (SSMs), while efficient for long-sequence processing, are fundamentally limited in their ability to represent formal languages-particularly due to time-invariant and real-valued recurrence structures. In this work, we draw inspiration from adaptive and structured dynamics observed in biological neural systems and introduce the Adaptive Unitary State Space Model (AUSSM): a novel class of SSMs that leverages skew-symmetric, input-dependent recurrence to achieve unitary evolution and high expressive power. Using algebraic automata theory, we prove that AUSSM can perform modulo counting and simulate solvable group automata at precision logarithmically bounded in the input length, enabling SSMs to model a broad class of regular languages out of reach for other SSM architectures. To overcome the practical inefficiencies of adaptive recurrence, we develop a separable convolution formulation and a CUDA implementation that enables scalable parallel training. Empirically, we show that AUSSM and its hybrid variant-interleaved with Mamba-outperform prior SSMs on formal algorithmic tasks such as parity and modular arithmetic, and achieve competent performance on real-world long time-series classification benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that adaptive unitary recurrence provides a powerful and efficient inductive bias for both symbolic and continuous sequence modeling. The code is available at https://github.com/arjunkaruvally/AUSSM
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_05238
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bridging Expressivity and Scalability with Adaptive Unitary SSMs
Karuvally, Arjun
Nowak, Franz
Keller, Anderson T.
Alonso, Carmen Amo
Sejnowski, Terrence J.
Siegelmann, Hava T.
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Recent work has revealed that state space models (SSMs), while efficient for long-sequence processing, are fundamentally limited in their ability to represent formal languages-particularly due to time-invariant and real-valued recurrence structures. In this work, we draw inspiration from adaptive and structured dynamics observed in biological neural systems and introduce the Adaptive Unitary State Space Model (AUSSM): a novel class of SSMs that leverages skew-symmetric, input-dependent recurrence to achieve unitary evolution and high expressive power. Using algebraic automata theory, we prove that AUSSM can perform modulo counting and simulate solvable group automata at precision logarithmically bounded in the input length, enabling SSMs to model a broad class of regular languages out of reach for other SSM architectures. To overcome the practical inefficiencies of adaptive recurrence, we develop a separable convolution formulation and a CUDA implementation that enables scalable parallel training. Empirically, we show that AUSSM and its hybrid variant-interleaved with Mamba-outperform prior SSMs on formal algorithmic tasks such as parity and modular arithmetic, and achieve competent performance on real-world long time-series classification benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that adaptive unitary recurrence provides a powerful and efficient inductive bias for both symbolic and continuous sequence modeling. The code is available at https://github.com/arjunkaruvally/AUSSM
title Bridging Expressivity and Scalability with Adaptive Unitary SSMs
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05238