state

Definition

The information a system carries forward at a given moment. In reinforcement learning it is what the policy observes about the environment; in sequence modeling it is the internal summary of everything seen so far. State space models such as the Mamba family compress history into a fixed-size state, giving cost linear in sequence length — the direct contrast with Transformers, which keep every past token available and pay quadratic attention cost for it.

Explainers using this term

• Mamba and State Space Models — Handling Sequences Without AttentionEfficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces
• Paper Walkthrough — FACET: Grounding Instruction, Environment, Solution and Verifier in One Executable StateFACET: Preserving Source Intent and Executable State in Terminal Task Synthesis