arXiv cs.LGAugust 17, 2026
The Expressive Limits of Diagonal SSMs for State-Tracking
Excerpt
arXiv:2603.01959v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State-Space Models (SSMs) have recently been shown to achieve strong empirical performance on a variety of long-range sequence modeling tasks while remaining efficient and highly-parallelizable. However, the theoretical understanding of their expressive power remains limited. In this work, we study the expressivity of input-Dependent Complex-valued Diagonal (DCD) SSMs on sequential state-tracking tasks. We show that single-layer DCD SSMs cannot