Beyond State Capacity: Why Retrieval Breaks in Mamba
Mamba models underperform Transformers on in-context retrieval. This gap is usually attributed to Mamba's fixed-size recurrent state, which loses information as the context grows. We challenge this assumption by focusing on query-first retrieval, a setup in which the query precedes the context and state capacity should not be the binding constraint. We show that even in this setting Mamba lags substantially behind Transformers, despite its selection mechanism, which was designed to distinguish relevant content from distractors. We then demonstrate that the Mamba selection gates have sufficient control over the state updates to influence the model output: intervening on specific gates alon...
| Authors | Nir Yarden, Amit Ben-Artzy, Roy Schwartz |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 14 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 October 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 15 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.