English

Breaking the Memory Wall: Exact Analytical Differentiation via Tiled Operator-Space Evolution

Machine Learning 2025-12-30 v1

Abstract

Selective State Space Models (SSMs) achieve linear-time inference, yet their gradient-based sensitivity analysis remains bottlenecked by O(L) memory scaling during backpropagation. This memory constraint precludes genomic-scale modeling (L > 10^5) on consumer-grade hardware. We introduce Phase Gradient Flow (PGF), a framework that computes exact analytical derivatives by operating directly in the state-space manifold, bypassing the need to materialize the intermediate computational graph. By reframing SSM dynamics as Tiled Operator-Space Evolution (TOSE), our method delivers O(1) memory complexity relative to sequence length, yielding a 94% reduction in peak VRAM and a 23x increase in throughput compared to standard Autograd. Unlike parallel prefix scans that exhibit numerical divergence in stiff ODE regimes, PGF ensures stability through invariant error scaling, maintaining near-machine precision across extreme sequences. We demonstrate the utility of PGF on an impulse-response benchmark with 128,000-step sequences - a scale where conventional Autograd encounters prohibitive memory overhead, often leading to out-of-memory (OOM) failures in multi-layered models. Our work enables chromosome-scale sensitivity analysis on a single GPU, bridging the gap between theoretical infinite-context models and practical hardware limitations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.23068,
  title  = {Breaking the Memory Wall: Exact Analytical Differentiation via Tiled Operator-Space Evolution},
  author = {Shuhuan Wang and Yuzhen Xie and Jiayi Li and Yinliang Diao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.23068},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:43:39.031Z