← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2510.12026 · v4
Mamba Can Learn Low-Dimensional Targets In-Context via Test-Time Feature Learning
首次提交 2025-10-14 08:21
版本更新 2026-11-08 18:19
雷达观测 2026-11-10 12:16
摘要
Mamba, a recently proposed linear-time sequence model, has attracted significant attention for its computational efficiency and strong empirical performance. However, a rigorous theoretical understanding of its underlying mechanisms remains limited. In this work, we provide a theoretical analysis of Mamba's in-context learning (ICL) capability by focusing on tasks defined by low-dimensional nonlinear target functions. Specifically, we study in-context learning of a single-index model $y \approx g_*(\langle \boldsymbolβ, \boldsymbol{x} \rangle)$, which depends on only a single relevant direction $\boldsymbolβ$, referred to as feature. We prove that Mamba, pretrained by gradient-based methods, can achieve efficient ICL via test-time feature learning, extracting the relevant direction directly from context examples. Consequently, we establish a test-time sample complexity that improves upon linear Transformers -- analyzed to behave like kernel methods -- and is comparable to nonlinear Transformers, which have been shown to surpass the Correlational Statistical Query (CSQ) lower bound and achieve near information-theoretically optimal rate in previous works. Our analysis reveals the crucial role of the nonlinear gating mechanism in Mamba for feature extraction, highlighting it as the fundamental driver behind Mamba's ability to achieve both computational efficiency and high performance.
作者备注：NeurIPS 2026 camera-ready version, 39 pages
观测到的版本
相邻记录可能跳过中间版本；首次发现 v2 及以上也会标为版本更新。
v4 · 2026-11-08 18:19 · 最新观测版本
Mamba Can Learn Low-Dimensional Targets In-Context via Test-Time Feature Learning
Mamba, a recently proposed linear-time sequence model, has attracted significant attention for its computational efficiency and strong empirical performance. However, a rigorous theoretical understanding of its underlying mechanisms remains limited. In this work, we provide a theoretical analysis of Mamba's in-context learning (ICL) capability by focusing on tasks defined by low-dimensional nonlinear target functions. Specifically, we study in-context learning of a single-index model $y \approx g_*(\langle \boldsymbolβ, \boldsymbol{x} \rangle)$, which depends on only a single relevant direction $\boldsymbolβ$, referred to as feature. We prove that Mamba, pretrained by gradient-based methods, can achieve efficient ICL via test-time feature learning, extracting the relevant direction directly from context examples. Consequently, we establish a test-time sample complexity that improves upon linear Transformers -- analyzed to behave like kernel methods -- and is comparable to nonlinear Transformers, which have been shown to surpass the Correlational Statistical Query (CSQ) lower bound and achieve near information-theoretically optimal rate in previous works. Our analysis reveals the crucial role of the nonlinear gating mechanism in Mamba for feature extraction, highlighting it as the fundamental driver behind Mamba's ability to achieve both computational efficiency and high performance.
查看此版本解读 →查看此版本原文 ↗