# MambaSL: Exploring Single-Layer Mamba for Time Series Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15174 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15174/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Time series forecasting with SSMs, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 43 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Time series forecasting with SSMs](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/time-series-forecasting-with-ssms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [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)
- [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)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13504/) (2022)
- [Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21060/) (2024)
- [FEDformer: Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer for Long-term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12740/) (2022)
- [TimesNet: Temporal 2D-Variation Modeling for General Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02186/) (2022)
- [iTransformer: Inverted Transformers Are Effective for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06625/) (2023)
- [On the Variance of the Adaptive Learning Rate and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03265/) (2019)
- [One Fits All:Power General Time Series Analysis by Pretrained LM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11939/) (2023)
- [Combining Recurrent, Convolutional, and Continuous-time Models with Linear State-Space Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13985/) (2021)
- [TS2Vec: Towards Universal Representation of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10466/) (2021)
- [InceptionTime: Finding AlexNet for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04939/) (2019)
- [ROCKET: Exceptionally fast and accurate time series classification using random convolutional kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13051/) (2019)
- [The UEA multivariate time series classification archive, 2018](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00075/) (2018)
- [VideoMamba: State Space Model for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06977/) (2024)
- [Long Range Language Modeling via Gated State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13947/) (2022)
- [Deep Time Series Models: A Comprehensive Survey and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13278/) (2024)
- [Transformer Quality in Linear Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10447/) (2022)
- [MINIROCKET: A Very Fast (Almost) Deterministic Transform for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08791/) (2020)
- [Less Is More: Fast Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Light Sampling-oriented MLP Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01186/) (2022)
- [ETSformer: Exponential Smoothing Transformers for Time-series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01381/) (2022)
- [HIVE-COTE 2.0: a new meta ensemble for time series classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07551/) (2021)
- [TimeMixer++: A General Time Series Pattern Machine for Universal Predictive Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16032/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Reshape and Recur: Improving SSMs with Input Reshaping and Depth Recurrence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16048/) (2026)
- [Memory in Deep Time-Series Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06006/) (2026)
- [When Labels Are Scarce: An Oscillatory State Space Model for Vibration Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27411/) (2026)
- [MASCIT: A Mask-Aware State Space Classifier for Naturally Irregular Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34409/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite recent advances in state space models (SSMs) such as Mamba across various sequence domains, research on their standalone capacity for time series classification (TSC) has remained limited. We propose MambaSL, a framework that minimally redesigns the selective SSM and projection layers of a single-layer Mamba, guided by four TSC-specific hypotheses. To address benchmarking limitations -- restricted configurations, partial University of East Anglia (UEA) dataset coverage, and insufficiently reproducible setups -- we re-evaluate 20 strong baselines across all 30 UEA datasets under a unified protocol. As a result, MambaSL achieves state-of-the-art performance with statistically significant average improvements, while ensuring reproducibility via public checkpoints for all evaluated models. Together with visualizations, these results demonstrate the potential of Mamba-based architectures as a TSC backbone.