Recurrent / convolutional / state-space
Translating between means of approximating time series dynamics
April 5, 2016 — March 5, 2024
A meeting point for some related ideas from different fields. Perspectives on analysing systems in terms of a latent, noisy state, and/or their history of noisy observations. This notebook is dedicated to the possibly-surprising fact we can move between hidden-state-type representations, and observed-state-only representations, and indeed mix them together conveniently. I have many thoughts about this, but nothing concrete to write down at the moment.
1 Linear systems
See linear feedback systems and linear filter design. for stuff about FIR vs IIR filters.
1.1 Linear Time-Invariant systems
Let us talk about Fourier transforms and spectral properties.
2 Koopman operators
Learning state is pointless! infer directly from observations! See Koopmania.
3 RNNs
Miller and Hardt (2018)
See RNNs.
4 Transformers
5 Stability of learning
Hochreiter et al. (2001); Hochreiter (1998); Lamb et al. (2016);Hardt, Ma, and Recht (2018) etc
6 Stability of dynamics
7 Conversion between representations
8 S4
Interesting package of tools from Christopher Ré’s lab, at the intersection of recurrent networks and . See HazyResearch/state-spaces: Sequence Modeling with Structured State Spaces. I find these aesthetically satisfying, because I spent 2 years of my PhD trying to solve the same problem, and failed. These folks did a better job, so I find it slightly validating that the idea was not stupid. Gu et al. (2021):
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs), temporal convolutions, and neural differential equations (NDEs) are popular families of deep learning models for time-series data, each with unique strengths and tradeoffs in modeling power and computational efficiency. We introduce a simple sequence model inspired by control systems that generalizes these approaches while addressing their shortcomings. The Linear State-Space Layer (LSSL) maps a sequence u↦y by simply simulating a linear continuous-time state-space representation x˙=Ax+Bu,y=Cx+Du. Theoretically, we show that LSSL models are closely related to the three aforementioned families of models and inherit their strengths. For example, they generalize convolutions to continuous-time, explain common RNN heuristics, and share features of NDEs such as time-scale adaptation. We then incorporate and generalize recent theory on continuous-time memorization to introduce a trainable subset of structured matrices A that endow LSSLs with long-range memory. Empirically, stacking LSSL layers into a simple deep neural network obtains state-of-the-art results across time series benchmarks for long dependencies in sequential image classification, real-world healthcare regression tasks, and speech. On a difficult speech classification task with length-16000 sequences, LSSL outperforms prior approaches by 24 accuracy points, and even outperforms baselines that use hand-crafted features on 100x shorter sequences.
Gu, Goel, and Ré (2021):
A central goal of sequence modeling is designing a single principled model that can address sequence data across a range of modalities and tasks, particularly on long-range dependencies. Although conventional models including RNNs, CNNs, and Transformers have specialized variants for capturing long dependencies, they still struggle to scale to very long sequences of 10000 or more steps. A promising recent approach proposed modeling sequences by simulating the fundamental state space model (SSM) $ x’(t) = Ax(t) + Bu(t), y(t) = Cx(t) + Du(t) $, and showed that for appropriate choices of the state matrix $ A $, this system could handle long-range dependencies mathematically and empirically. However, this method has prohibitive computation and memory requirements, rendering it infeasible as a general sequence modeling solution. We propose the Structured State Space sequence model (S4) based on a new parameterization for the SSM, and show that it can be computed much more efficiently than prior approaches while preserving their theoretical strengths. Our technique involves conditioning $ A $ with a low-rank correction, allowing it to be diagonalized stably and reducing the SSM to the well-studied computation of a Cauchy kernel. S4 achieves strong empirical results across a diverse range of established benchmarks, including (i) 91% accuracy on sequential CIFAR-10 with no data augmentation or auxiliary losses, on par with a larger 2-D ResNet, (ii) substantially closing the gap to Transformers on image and language modeling tasks, while performing generation 60× faster (iii) SoTA on every task from the Long Range Arena benchmark, including solving the challenging Path-X task of length 16k that all prior work fails on, while being as efficient as all competitors.
Related? Li et al. (2022)
Interesting parallel to the recursive/non-recursive transformer duality in How the RWKV language models. Question: Can they do the jobs of transformers? Nearly (Vardasbi et al. 2023).
8.1 Mamba
Interesting connection to transformers.
Foundation models, now powering most of the exciting applications in deep learning, are almost universally based on the Transformer architecture and its core attention module. Many subquadratic-time architectures such as linear attention, gated convolution and recurrent models, and structured state space models (SSMs) have been developed to address Transformers’ computational inefficiency on long sequences, but they have not performed as well as attention on important modalities such as language. We identify that a key weakness of such models is their inability to perform content-based reasoning, and make several improvements. First, simply letting the SSM parameters be functions of the input addresses their weakness with discrete modalities, allowing the model to selectively propagate or forget information along the sequence length dimension depending on the current token. Second, even though this change prevents the use of efficient convolutions, we design a hardware-aware parallel algorithm in recurrent mode. We integrate these selective SSMs into a simplified end-to-end neural network architecture without attention or even MLP blocks (Mamba). Mamba enjoys fast inference (5× higher throughput than Transformers) and linear scaling in sequence length, and its performance improves on real data up to million-length sequences. As a general sequence model backbone, Mamba achieves state-of-the-art performance across several modalities such as language, audio, and genomics. On language modeling, our Mamba-3B model outperforms Transformers of the same size and matches Transformers twice its size, both in pretraining and downstream evaluation.
See
9 Incoming
Simchowitz, Boczar, and Recht (2019)
We analyze a simple prefiltered variation of the least squares estimator for the problem of estimation with biased, semi-parametric noise, an error model studied more broadly in causal statistics and active learning. We prove an oracle inequality which demonstrates that this procedure provably mitigates the variance introduced by long-term dependencies. We then demonstrate that prefiltered least squares yields, to our knowledge, the first algorithm that provably estimates the parameters of partially-observed linear systems that attains rates which do not not incur a worst-case dependence on the rate at which these dependencies decay. The algorithm is provably consistent even for systems which satisfy the weaker marginal stability condition obeyed by many classical models based on Newtonian mechanics. In this context, our semi-parametric framework yields guarantees for both stochastic and worst-case noise.