SF-Mamba: Rethinking State Space Model for Vision
Visual Mamba models have recently emerged as alternatives to Vision Transformers (ViTs), which suffer from quadratic complexity. While the recurrent scanning mechanism of Mamba offers computational efficiency, it inherently limits non-causal interactions between image patches. Prior works have attempted to address this limitation through various multi-scan strategies; however, these approaches suffer from inefficiencies due to suboptimal scan designs and frequent data rearrangement. Moreover, Mamba exhibits relatively slow computational speed under short token lengths, commonly used in visual tasks. In pursuit of a truly efficient vision encoder, we rethink the scan operation for vision and the computational efficiency of Mamba. To this end, we propose SF-Mamba, a novel visual Mamba with two key proposals: auxiliary patch \textbf{swapping} for encoding bidirectional information flow under an unidirectional scan and batch \textbf{folding} with periodic state reset for advanced GPU parallelism. Extensive experiments on image classification, object detection, and instance and semantic segmentation consistently demonstrate that our proposed SF-Mamba significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while improving throughput across different model sizes. The source code is available at: sony/SF-Mamba.
Comments: Accepted to ICML2026. Code: sony/SF-Mamba
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SF-Mamba: Rethinking State Space Model for Vision Visual Mamba models have recently emerged as alternatives to Vision Transformers (ViTs), which suffer from quadratic complexity. While the recurrent scanning mechanism of Mamba offers computational efficiency, it inherently limits non-causal interactions between image patches. Prior works have attempted to address this limitation through various multi-scan strategies; however, these approaches suffer from inefficiencies due to suboptimal scan designs and frequent data rearrangement. Moreover, Mamba exhibits relatively slow computational speed under short token lengths, commonly used in visual tasks. In pursuit of a truly efficient vision encoder, we rethink the scan operation for vision and the computational efficiency of Mamba. To this end, we propose SF-Mamba, a novel visual Mamba with two key proposals: auxiliary patch \textbf{swapping} for encoding bidirectional information flow under an unidirectional scan and batch \textbf{folding} with periodic state reset for advanced GPU parallelism. Extensive experiments on image classification, object detection, and instance and semantic segmentation consistently demonstrate that our proposed SF-Mamba significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while improving throughput across different model sizes. The source code is available at: sony/SF-Mamba. Comments: Accepted to ICML2026. Code: sony/SF-Mamba