Khaled K. Saab

Daniel Y. Fu, Tri Dao, Khaled K. Saab et al. · stanford

State space models (SSMs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art sequence modeling performance in some modalities, but underperform attention in language modeling. Moreover, despite scaling nearly linearly in sequence length instead of quadratically, SSMs are still slower than Transformers due to poor hardware utilization. In this paper, we make progress on understanding the expressivity gap between SSMs and attention in language modeling, and on reducing the hardware barrier between SSMs and attention. First, we use synthetic language modeling tasks to understand the gap between SSMs and attention. We find that existing SSMs struggle with two capabilities: recalling earlier tokens in the sequence and comparing tokens across the sequence. To understand the impact on language modeling, we propose a new SSM layer, H3, that is explicitly designed for these abilities. H3 matches attention on the synthetic languages and comes within 0.4 PPL of Transformers on OpenWebText. Furthermore, a hybrid 125M-parameter H3-attention model that retains two attention layers surprisingly outperforms Transformers on OpenWebText by 1.0 PPL. Next, to improve the efficiency of training SSMs on modern hardware, we propose FlashConv. FlashConv uses a fused block FFT algorithm to improve efficiency on sequences up to 8K, and introduces a novel state passing algorithm that exploits the recurrent properties of SSMs to scale to longer sequences. FlashConv yields 2$\times$ speedup on the long-range arena benchmark and allows hybrid language models to generate text 2.4$\times$ faster than Transformers. Using FlashConv, we scale hybrid H3-attention language models up to 2.7B parameters on the Pile and find promising initial results, achieving lower perplexity than Transformers and outperforming Transformers in zero- and few-shot learning on a majority of tasks in the SuperGLUE benchmark.

Siyi Tang, Jared A. Dunnmon, Liangqiong Qu et al. · stanford

Multivariate biosignals are prevalent in many medical domains, such as electroencephalography, polysomnography, and electrocardiography. Modeling spatiotemporal dependencies in multivariate biosignals is challenging due to (1) long-range temporal dependencies and (2) complex spatial correlations between the electrodes. To address these challenges, we propose representing multivariate biosignals as time-dependent graphs and introduce GraphS4mer, a general graph neural network (GNN) architecture that improves performance on biosignal classification tasks by modeling spatiotemporal dependencies in biosignals. Specifically, (1) we leverage the Structured State Space architecture, a state-of-the-art deep sequence model, to capture long-range temporal dependencies in biosignals and (2) we propose a graph structure learning layer in GraphS4mer to learn dynamically evolving graph structures in the data. We evaluate our proposed model on three distinct biosignal classification tasks and show that GraphS4mer consistently improves over existing models, including (1) seizure detection from electroencephalographic signals, outperforming a previous GNN with self-supervised pre-training by 3.1 points in AUROC; (2) sleep staging from polysomnographic signals, a 4.1 points improvement in macro-F1 score compared to existing sleep staging models; and (3) 12-lead electrocardiogram classification, outperforming previous state-of-the-art models by 2.7 points in macro-F1 score.

Michael Zhang, Khaled K. Saab, Michael Poli et al. · stanford

Time series modeling is a well-established problem, which often requires that methods (1) expressively represent complicated dependencies, (2) forecast long horizons, and (3) efficiently train over long sequences. State-space models (SSMs) are classical models for time series, and prior works combine SSMs with deep learning layers for efficient sequence modeling. However, we find fundamental limitations with these prior approaches, proving their SSM representations cannot express autoregressive time series processes. We thus introduce SpaceTime, a new state-space time series architecture that improves all three criteria. For expressivity, we propose a new SSM parameterization based on the companion matrix -- a canonical representation for discrete-time processes -- which enables SpaceTime's SSM layers to learn desirable autoregressive processes. For long horizon forecasting, we introduce a "closed-loop" variation of the companion SSM, which enables SpaceTime to predict many future time-steps by generating its own layer-wise inputs. For efficient training and inference, we introduce an algorithm that reduces the memory and compute of a forward pass with the companion matrix. With sequence length $\ell$ and state-space size $d$, we go from $\tilde{O}(d \ell)$ naïvely to $\tilde{O}(d + \ell)$. In experiments, our contributions lead to state-of-the-art results on extensive and diverse benchmarks, with best or second-best AUROC on 6 / 7 ECG and speech time series classification, and best MSE on 14 / 16 Informer forecasting tasks. Furthermore, we find SpaceTime (1) fits AR($p$) processes that prior deep SSMs fail on, (2) forecasts notably more accurately on longer horizons than prior state-of-the-art, and (3) speeds up training on real-world ETTh1 data by 73% and 80% relative wall-clock time over Transformers and LSTMs.