# State Space Model for New-Generation Network Alternative to Transformers: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09516 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09516/

## Key facts

- Cited by 59 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 219 of its 259 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 219)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01345/) (2021)
- [Mastering Diverse Domains through World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04104/) (2023)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13048/) (2023)
- [Simplified State Space Layers for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04933/) (2022)
- [Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08621/) (2023)
- [Combining Recurrent, Convolutional, and Continuous-time Models with Linear State-Space Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13985/) (2021)
- [Network In Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4400/) (2013)
- [HiPPO: Recurrent Memory with Optimal Polynomial Projections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07669/) (2020)
- [Gated Linear Attention Transformers with Hardware-Efficient Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06635/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [RoboMamba: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Reasoning and Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04339/) (2024)
- [Vision Mamba: A Comprehensive Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04404/) (2024)
- [Visual Mamba: A Survey and New Outlooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18861/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01129/) (2024)
- [Context Clues: Evaluating Long Context Models for Clinical Prediction Tasks on EHRs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16178/) (2024)
- [Were RNNs All We Needed?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01201/) (2024)
- [RSCaMa: Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning with State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18895/) (2024)
- [CXPMRG-Bench: Pre-training and Benchmarking for X-ray Medical Report Generation on CheXpert Plus Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00379/) (2024)
- [Matten: Video Generation with Mamba-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03025/) (2024)
- [MemoryMamba: Memory-Augmented State Space Model for Defect Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03673/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Scanning Strategies with Vision Mamba in Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Imagery: An Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08493/) (2024)
- [Mamba-FETrack: Frame-Event Tracking via State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18174/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Efficient and Effective Point-based Networks for Event Camera Classification and Regression: EventMamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06116/) (2024)
- [Mamba-in-Mamba: Centralized Mamba-Cross-Scan in Tokenized Mamba Model for Hyperspectral Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12003/) (2024)
- [Mamba in Vision: A Comprehensive Survey of Techniques and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03105/) (2024)
- [Reasoning Beyond Limits: Advances and Open Problems for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22732/) (2025)
- [MambaTS: Improved Selective State Space Models for Long-term Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16440/) (2024)
- [Mixture of Sparse Attention: Content-Based Learnable Sparse Attention via Expert-Choice Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00315/) (2025)
- [IRSRMamba: Infrared Image Super-Resolution via Mamba-based Wavelet Transform Feature Modulation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09873/) (2024)
- [What Can We Learn from State Space Models for Machine Learning on Graphs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05815/) (2024)
- [R2GenCSR: Mining Contextual and Residual Information for LLMs-based Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09743/) (2024)
- [MambaEVT: Event Stream based Visual Object Tracking using State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10487/) (2024)
- [MambaDS: Near-Surface Meteorological Field Downscaling with Topography Constrained Selective State Space Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10854/) (2024)
- [MaIL: Improving Imitation Learning with Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08234/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Transformer Context Extension: Approaches and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13299/) (2025)
- [An Empirical Study of Mamba-based Pedestrian Attribute Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10374/) (2024)
- [Pedestrian Attribute Recognition: A New Benchmark Dataset and A Large Language Model Augmented Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09720/) (2024)
- [Advancing Intelligent Sequence Modeling: Evolution, Trade-offs, and Applications of State-Space Architectures from S4 to Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18970/) (2025)
- [Block-Biased Mamba for Long-Range Sequence Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09022/) (2025)
- [Pre-training on High Definition X-ray Images: An Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17926/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the post-deep learning era, the Transformer architecture has demonstrated its powerful performance across pre-trained big models and various downstream tasks. However, the enormous computational demands of this architecture have deterred many researchers. To further reduce the complexity of attention models, numerous efforts have been made to design more efficient methods. Among them, the State Space Model (SSM), as a possible replacement for the self-attention based Transformer model, has drawn more and more attention in recent years. In this paper, we give the first comprehensive review of these works and also provide experimental comparisons and analysis to better demonstrate the features and advantages of SSM. Specifically, we first give a detailed description of principles to help the readers quickly capture the key ideas of SSM. After that, we dive into the reviews of existing SSMs and their various applications, including natural language processing, computer vision, graph, multi-modal and multi-media, point cloud/event stream, time series data, and other domains. In addition, we give statistical comparisons and analysis of these models and hope it helps the readers to understand the effectiveness of different structures on various tasks. Then, we propose possible research points in this direction to better promote the development of the theoretical model and application of SSM. More related works will be continuously updated on the following GitHub: https://github.com/Event-AHU/Mamba_State_Space_Model_Paper_List.