# BlackMamba: Mixture of Experts for State-Space Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01771 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01771/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MoE large language models, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts.
- Builds on 36 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Feb 2024.

## Placed in

- Mixture-of-experts / [MoE large language models](https://mlsanity.com/moe/moe-large-language-models/)
- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Core SSM architectures for language](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/core-ssm-architectures-for-language/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [Pythia: A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01373/) (2023)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [The LAMBADA dataset: Word prediction requiring a broad discourse context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06031/) (2016)
- [RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13048/) (2023)
- [A Generalist Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06175/) (2022)
- [StarCoder: may the source be with you!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06161/) (2023)
- [Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Positional Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15595/) (2023)
- [Compressive Transformers for Long-Range Sequence Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05507/) (2019)
- [Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08621/) (2023)
- [YaRN: Efficient Context Window Extension of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00071/) (2023)
- [DeepSpeed-MoE: Advancing Mixture-of-Experts Inference and Training to Power Next-Generation AI Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05596/) (2022)
- [Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10866/) (2023)
- [Llemma: An Open Language Model For Mathematics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10631/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Zamba: A Compact 7B SSM Hybrid Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16712/) (2024)
- [The Hidden Attention of Mamba Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01590/) (2024)
- [ZigMa: A DiT-style Zigzag Mamba Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13802/) (2024)
- [Mamba-360: Survey of State Space Models as Transformer Alternative for Long Sequence Modelling: Methods, Applications, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16112/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Visual Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15956/) (2024)
- [Understanding the Performance and Estimating the Cost of LLM Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04693/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01129/) (2024)
- [MambaLRP: Explaining Selective State Space Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07592/) (2024)
- [Learning Pattern-Specific Experts for Time Series Forecasting Under Patch-level Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09836/) (2024)
- [PointRWKV: Efficient RWKV-Like Model for Hierarchical Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15214/) (2024)
- [The Zamba2 Suite: Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15242/) (2024)
- [CMViM: Contrastive Masked Vim Autoencoder for 3D Multi-modal Representation Learning for AD classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16520/) (2024)
- [FlashMoE: Fast Distributed MoE in a Single Kernel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04667/) (2025)
- [Zyda-2: a 5 Trillion Token High-Quality Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06068/) (2024)
- [Explaining Modern Gated-Linear RNNs via a Unified Implicit Attention Formulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16504/) (2024)
- [Provable Benefits of Complex Parameterizations for Structured State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14067/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Online Continual Learning with Plug-and-Play State Space Model and Class-Conditional Mixture of Discretization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18177/) (2024)
- [Mixture-of-Mamba: Enhancing Multi-Modal State-Space Models with Modality-Aware Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16295/) (2025)
- [Sequential Order-Robust Mamba for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23356/) (2024)
- [Continual Pre-training of MoEs: How robust is your router?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05029/) (2025)
- [Routing Mamba: Scaling State Space Models with Mixture-of-Experts Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18145/) (2025)
- [Mamba State-Space Models Are Lyapunov-Stable Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00209/) (2024)
- [CymbaDiff: Structured Spatial Diffusion for Sketch-based 3D Semantic Urban Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13245/) (2025)
- [Technologies on Effectiveness and Efficiency: A Survey of State Spaces Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11224/) (2025)
- [Online Mixture of Experts: No-Regret Learning for Optimal Collective Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21788/) (2025)
- [Hidden State Poisoning Attacks against Mamba-based Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01972/) (2026)
- [Efficient Continual Learning in Language Models via Thalamically Routed Cortical Columns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22479/) (2026)
- [WiSP: A Working-Set View of Mixture-of-Experts Serving on Extremely Low-Resource Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21868/) (2026)
- [Mamba as Decision Maker: Exploring Multi-scale Sequence Modeling in Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02013/) (2024)
- [Venturing into Uncharted Waters: The Navigation Compass from Transformer to Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16722/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

State-space models (SSMs) have recently demonstrated competitive performance to transformers at large-scale language modeling benchmarks while achieving linear time and memory complexity as a function of sequence length. Mamba, a recently released SSM model, shows impressive performance in both language modeling and long sequence processing tasks. Simultaneously, mixture-of-expert (MoE) models have shown remarkable performance while significantly reducing the compute and latency costs of inference at the expense of a larger memory footprint. In this paper, we present BlackMamba, a novel architecture that combines the Mamba SSM with MoE to obtain the benefits of both. We demonstrate that BlackMamba performs competitively against both Mamba and transformer baselines, and outperforms in inference and training FLOPs. We fully train and open-source 340M/1.5B and 630M/2.8B BlackMamba models on 300B tokens of a custom dataset. We show that BlackMamba inherits and combines both of the benefits of SSM and MoE architectures, combining linear-complexity generation from SSM with cheap and fast inference from MoE. We release all weights, checkpoints, and inference code open-source. Inference code at: https://github.com/Zyphra/BlackMamba