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On the Recall Scaling Laws in Mamba: A Theoretical and Mechanistic Study via Hashing

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 7, 2026 · UTC

Associative Recall (AR) is the cognitive ability to learn and retrieve links between items in memory. In NLP, AR is used as a benchmark for evaluating the in-context memory capacity of architectures such as Mamba, and has been found to strongly correlate with language modeling performance. This paper explores AR from the perspective of mechanistic interpretability, aiming to reverse-engineer the exact internal algorithm used by Mamba to perform recall. Our key insight is that Mamba performs recall by implicitly learning linear hash functions, and we identify the low-level circuit that enables

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