State Space Models & Structured SSMs Reading List

Curated by Mouhssine Rifaki | Stanford Electrical Engineering | Last updated August 2026

Foundational and modern papers on state space models for sequence modeling, from HiPPO and S4 to Mamba and structured SSMs for long-range dependencies.

State Space Models & Structured SSMs: 10 key papers

1. Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces
   Gu et al. arXiv 2021.
2. Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces
   Gu and Dao. arXiv 2023.
3. Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality
   Dao and Gu. arXiv 2024.
4. Combining Recurrent, Convolutional, and Continuous-time Models with Linear State-Space Layers
   Gu et al. arXiv 2021.
5. Diagonal State Spaces are as Effective as Structured State Spaces
   Gupta et al. arXiv 2022.
6. On the Parameterization and Initialization of Diagonal State Space Models
   Gu et al. arXiv 2022.
7. Simplified State Space Layers for Sequence Modeling
   Smith et al. arXiv 2022.
8. Hungry Hungry Hippos: Towards Language Modeling with State Space Models
   Fu et al. arXiv 2022.
9. Long Range Language Modeling via Gated State Spaces
   Mehta et al. arXiv 2022.
10. HiPPO: Recurrent Memory with Optimal Polynomial Projections
    Gu et al. arXiv 2020.

Related reading lists

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• Time Series Forecasting & Temporal Models
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• In-Context RL & Prompting
• Linear MDPs & Linear Function Approximation
• Memory-Augmented RL & Recurrent Policies
• Transformers for Sequential Decision Making
• Block MDPs & Latent State Discovery