CHASE: Cache-Hole-Adapted Skip Exit for Looped State-Space Language Models

Abstract

Recent work on looped language models suggests that many reasoning problems benefit from greater computational depth rather than from additional independent parameters. Existing studies, however, focus almost exclusively on Transformer backbones, leaving open whether this principle also applies to state-space language models. We investigate Looped Mamba and Looped Hybrid Mamba-Transformer architectures, which repeatedly apply a shared Mamba (or hybrid) block to introduce explicit finite-depth recurrent computation. On two controlled reasoning tasks-Mano (modular-arithmetic manipulation) and p-hop induction-Looped Mamba consistently outperforms parameter-matched non-looped baselines and, in several settings, matches or exceeds non-looped models of equal effective depth. We then extend the study to language model pre-training under matched iso-parameter and iso-FLOPs protocols, which jointly disentangle the effects of parameter sharing and effective depth: looped models remain competitive on downstream benchmarks with substantially fewer distinct parameters, although deeper non-looped models retain an advantage in validation perplexity under strict iso-FLOPs comparisons. Finally, we adapt Ouro's two-stage exit gate to Looped Mamba for threshold-controlled selection among recurrent-step outputs. Executing such exits on a state-space backbone, however, leaves the recurrent state without its deeper updates, and validation perplexity then degrades severely. We therefore introduce a cache-hole adaptation that aligns continued training with skipped-state inference. At the scales studied, the adapted model keeps perplexity close to full computation and matches or exceeds full-compute exit-state selection on downstream benchmarks while executing roughly half of the recurrent steps, which translates into measured inference speedups once the prefill is compute-bound.