Beyond Diagonal State Space Models: Exact Non-Abelian Group Tracking, Solvability Barriers, and Geometric Physical Manifolds
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Abstract (arXiv)
Selective state space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, S4D, and LRU, are bounded by transition matrix commutativity (A_t A_t' = A_t' A_t) and solvable affine transformation groups (Aff_D of derived length <= 2). Consequently, stacked multi-layer diagonal networks face severe optimization degradation on non-solvable simple groups such as A_5 due to the exponential circuit emulation depth required to simulate non-abelian commutators. We propose Non-Commutative State Space Models (NC-SSM), their real-orthogonal counterpart SO(3)-SSM, and arbitrary-dimension Cayley-SSM, lifting state transitions to compact Lie groups SU(2), SO(3), and SO(N). Via closed-form Euler-Rodrigues maps and rational Cayley transforms, NC-SSM achieves exact norm-preserving isometry (||U_t|| = 1). We introduce pure Hopf-fibration Bloch projective readouts (S^3/{+-1} =~ S^2 =~ SO(3)) to eliminate sign ambiguity, true quaternion parallel prefix scans (9.06x speedup at T=2048), and Identity-Gated Lie SSMs to eliminate sparse syntax phase drift. Extensive benchmarks across 14 experimental regimes show: (1) NC-SSM achieves 100% tracking on S_3, D_4, Q_8 and simple group A_5, where a 3-layer deep diagonal baseline collapses to 6.60% (p = 8.81e-4); (2) Cayley-SO(5)-SSM breaks Klein's 1884 ceiling on symmetric group S_5 (50.92% vs diagonal 5.25%, p = 0.0015, delivering 7.8x variance reduction over SO(3)); (3) SO(3)-SSM preserves Riemannian manifolds across 300 steps (< 3.12e-6 drift, > 580,000x advantage), achieving 0.04 deg dead-reckoning error and active tangent denoising; (4) NC-SSM achieves 74.36% on Dyck-2 and 30.26% on deep AST scope tracking (p = 0.0081); and (5) ablation confirms strict isometry is mathematically necessary for lossless long-range associative memory.
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References · 7
- 2023Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spacescited by 4,616
- 2021Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spacescited by 2,424
- 2024Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Dualitycited by 1,283
- 2023Resurrecting Recurrent Neural Networks for Long Sequencescited by 397
- 2015Unitary Evolution Recurrent Neural Networkscited by 291
- 2024Simple linear attention language models balance the recall-throughput tradeoffcited by 197
- 2024The Expressive Capacity of State Space Models: A Formal Language Perspectivecited by 45
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- 2026The Expressive Limits of Diagonal SSMs for State-Tracking
- 2025Structured Sparse Transition Matrices to Enable State Tracking in State-Space Models
- 2025Uncovering the Spectral Bias in Diagonal State Space Models
- 2026Multi-agent Autoformalization of Tensor Network Theory
- 2024Provable Benefits of Complex Parameterizations for Structured State Space Models
- 2026Phase Space Attention:A Hairer Lift Circumvents the Single-Layer Induction Obstruction
- 2026The Attention Within: Consensus Dynamics in Selective State Space Models
- 2024Theoretical Foundations of Deep Selective State-Space Models