LightMamba: Efficient Mamba Acceleration on FPGA with Quantization and Hardware Co-design
On the map: State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) → Core SSM architectures for language
Abstract (arXiv)
State space models (SSMs) like Mamba have recently attracted much attention. Compared to Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), Mamba achieves linear computation complexity with the sequence length and demonstrates superior performance. However, Mamba is hard to accelerate due to the scattered activation outliers and the complex computation dependency, rendering existing LLM accelerators inefficient. In this paper, we propose LightMamba that co-designs the quantization algorithm and FPGA accelerator architecture for efficient Mamba inference. We first propose an FPGA-friendly post-training quantization algorithm that features rotation-assisted quantization and power-of-two SSM quantization to reduce the majority of computation to 4-bit. We further design an FPGA accelerator that partially unrolls the Mamba computation to balance the efficiency and hardware costs. Through computation reordering as well as fine-grained tiling and fusion, the hardware utilization and memory efficiency of the accelerator get drastically improved. We implement LightMamba on Xilinx Versal VCK190 FPGA and achieve 4.65x to 6.06x higher energy efficiency over the GPU baseline. When evaluated on Alveo U280 FPGA, LightMamba reaches 93 tokens/s, which is 1.43x that of the GPU baseline. Our code is available at https://github.com/PKU-SEC-Lab/LightMamba.
Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Core SSM architectures for language, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba). Builds on 26 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Feb 2025.
Builds on
26 of 33 references.
Closest ancestors · 3
Same direction, newest first
- 2024Mamba-PTQ: Outlier Channels in Recurrent Large Language Models17 Jul
- 2024Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality31 May
- 2023Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces1 Dec
Other references · 23
- 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 13,958
- 2023Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Modelscited by 12,865
- 2018Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challengecited by 4,710
- 2019HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?cited by 4,018
- 2016Pointer Sentinel Mixture Modelscited by 2,992
- 2019PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Languagecited by 2,818
- 2023Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4cited by 2,579
- 2018Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answeringcited by 2,114
- 2024Mixtral of Expertscited by 1,785
- 2022SmoothQuant: Accurate and Efficient Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Modelscited by 1,338
- 2022LLM.int8(): 8-bit Matrix Multiplication for Transformers at Scalecited by 881
- 2024QuaRot: Outlier-Free 4-Bit Inference in Rotated LLMscited by 598
11 more
- 2024SpinQuant: LLM quantization with learned rotationscited by 446
- 2019WinoGrande: An Adversarial Winograd Schema Challenge at Scalecited by 194
- 2022Outlier Suppression: Pushing the Limit of Low-bit Transformer Language Modelscited by 176
- 2024Evaluating Quantized Large Language Modelscited by 75
- 2024FlightLLM: Efficient Large Language Model Inference with a Complete Mapping Flow on FPGAscited by 60
- 2020FTRANS: Energy-Efficient Acceleration of Transformers using FPGAcited by 52
- 2022DFX: A Low-latency Multi-FPGA Appliance for Accelerating Transformer-based Text Generationcited by 46
- 2022Adaptable Butterfly Accelerator for Attention-based NNs via Hardware and Algorithm Co-designcited by 29
- 2023Understanding the Potential of FPGA-Based Spatial Acceleration for Large Language Model Inferencecited by 29
- 2024MARCA: Mamba Accelerator with ReConfigurable Architecturecited by 13
- 2024HG-PIPE: Vision Transformer Acceleration with Hybrid-Grained Pipelinecited by 7
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 5; 2026: 6.
11 papers.
- 2025SpecMamba: Accelerating Mamba Inference on FPGA with Speculative Decodingcited by 5
- 2025EfficientNav: Towards On-Device Object-Goal Navigation with Navigation Map Caching and Retrievalcited by 5
- 2026KEEP: A KV-Cache-Centric Memory Management System for Efficient Embodied Planningcited by 3
- 2026A Persistent-State Dataflow Accelerator for Memory-Bound Linear Attention Decode on FPGAcited by 2
- 2025eMamba: Efficient Acceleration Framework for Mamba Models in Edge Computingcited by 1
- 2025TeLLMe v2: An Efficient End-to-End Ternary LLM Prefill and Decode Accelerator with Table-Lookup Matmul on Edge FPGAscited by 1
- 2025FPQVAR: Floating Point Quantization for Visual Autoregressive Model with FPGA Hardware Co-designcited by 0
- 2026UFO: Unlocking Ultra-Efficient Quantized Private Inference with Protocol and Algorithm Co-Optimizationcited by 0
- 2026ViM-Q: Scalable Algorithm-Hardware Co-Design for Vision Mamba Model Inference on FPGAcited by 0
- 2026State Space Models Meet Remote Sensing: A Surveycited by 0
- 2026HYDRA: A Heterogeneous Chiplet DSE Framework for Serving Dynamic Hybrid LLM Workloadscited by 0
- 2026HYDRA: A Heterogeneous Chiplet DSE Framework for Serving Dynamic Hybrid LLM Workloads19 Aug 2026
- 2026State Space Models Meet Remote Sensing: A Survey24 Jun 2026
- 2026ViM-Q: Scalable Algorithm-Hardware Co-Design for Vision Mamba Model Inference on FPGA3 May 2026
- 2026A Persistent-State Dataflow Accelerator for Memory-Bound Linear Attention Decode on FPGA6 Mar 2026
- 2026KEEP: A KV-Cache-Centric Memory Management System for Efficient Embodied Planning27 Feb 2026
- 2026UFO: Unlocking Ultra-Efficient Quantized Private Inference with Protocol and Algorithm Co-Optimization21 Feb 2026
- 2025EfficientNav: Towards On-Device Object-Goal Navigation with Navigation Map Caching and Retrieval21 Oct 2025
- 2025TeLLMe v2: An Efficient End-to-End Ternary LLM Prefill and Decode Accelerator with Table-Lookup Matmul on Edge FPGAs3 Oct 2025
- 2025SpecMamba: Accelerating Mamba Inference on FPGA with Speculative Decoding24 Sep 2025
- 2025eMamba: Efficient Acceleration Framework for Mamba Models in Edge Computing14 Aug 2025
- 2025FPQVAR: Floating Point Quantization for Visual Autoregressive Model with FPGA Hardware Co-design22 May 2025
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025FastMamba: A High-Speed and Efficient Mamba Accelerator on FPGA with Accurate Quantization
- 2025LUT-LLM: Efficient Large Language Model Inference with Memory-based Computations on FPGAs
- 2025On-Device Qwen2.5: Efficient LLM Inference with Model Compression and Hardware Acceleration
- 2024MixPE: Quantization and Hardware Co-design for Efficient LLM Inference
- 2024The Mamba in the Llama: Distilling and Accelerating Hybrid Models
- 2024Jamba: A Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Language Model
- 2025Characterizing the Behavior of Training Mamba-based State Space Models on GPUs
- 2025Quamba2: A Robust and Scalable Post-training Quantization Framework for Selective State Space Models