The Curious Case of In-Training Compression of State Space Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chahine, Makram, Nazari, Philipp, Rus, Daniela, Rusch, T. Konstantin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Chahine, Makram
Nazari, Philipp
Rus, Daniela
Rusch, T. Konstantin
author_facet Chahine, Makram
Nazari, Philipp
Rus, Daniela
Rusch, T. Konstantin
contents State Space Models (SSMs), developed to tackle long sequence modeling tasks efficiently, offer both parallelizable training and fast inference. At their core are recurrent dynamical systems that maintain a hidden state, with update costs scaling with the state dimension. A key design challenge is striking the right balance between maximizing expressivity and limiting this computational burden. Control theory, and more specifically Hankel singular value analysis, provides a potent framework for the measure of energy for each state, as well as the balanced truncation of the original system down to a smaller representation with performance guarantees. Leveraging the eigenvalue stability properties of Hankel matrices, we apply this lens to SSMs \emph{during training}, where only dimensions of high influence are identified and preserved. Our approach, \textsc{CompreSSM}, applies to Linear Time-Invariant SSMs such as Linear Recurrent Units, but is also extendable to selective models. Experiments show that in-training reduction significantly accelerates optimization while preserving expressivity, with compressed models retaining task-critical structure lost by models trained directly at smaller dimension. In other words, SSMs that begin large and shrink during training achieve computational efficiency while maintaining higher performance. Project code is available at github.com/camail-official/compressm.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_02823
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Curious Case of In-Training Compression of State Space Models
Chahine, Makram
Nazari, Philipp
Rus, Daniela
Rusch, T. Konstantin
Machine Learning
68T07
I.2.0; I.2.7
State Space Models (SSMs), developed to tackle long sequence modeling tasks efficiently, offer both parallelizable training and fast inference. At their core are recurrent dynamical systems that maintain a hidden state, with update costs scaling with the state dimension. A key design challenge is striking the right balance between maximizing expressivity and limiting this computational burden. Control theory, and more specifically Hankel singular value analysis, provides a potent framework for the measure of energy for each state, as well as the balanced truncation of the original system down to a smaller representation with performance guarantees. Leveraging the eigenvalue stability properties of Hankel matrices, we apply this lens to SSMs \emph{during training}, where only dimensions of high influence are identified and preserved. Our approach, \textsc{CompreSSM}, applies to Linear Time-Invariant SSMs such as Linear Recurrent Units, but is also extendable to selective models. Experiments show that in-training reduction significantly accelerates optimization while preserving expressivity, with compressed models retaining task-critical structure lost by models trained directly at smaller dimension. In other words, SSMs that begin large and shrink during training achieve computational efficiency while maintaining higher performance. Project code is available at github.com/camail-official/compressm.
title The Curious Case of In-Training Compression of State Space Models
topic Machine Learning
68T07
I.2.0; I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02823