Research Proposal Evaluator

Automated evaluation of research proposals using AI-powered analysis

This demo primarily evaluates research proposals written after brainstorming with collaborators, mainly focusing on reflecting the value of ideas rather than writing.

Research Proposal Format:

The proposal is suggested to include:

• Title
• Problem Statement
• Motivation & Hypothesis
• Proposed Method
• Step-by-Step Experiment Plan

Proposal Example: {click for example} Criterias: {click for criteria}

Submit Your Research Proposal

Please provide your research proposal text below and click "Evaluate" to get a comprehensive assessment.

Upload PDF or Provide URL

Upload PDF File:

Choose File

Or PDF URL:

Research Proposal Text:

Evaluating your proposal... This may take a few moments.

AI Thinking Process

Evaluation Results

Additional Review Details

1. Title: Mamba: Exploring Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces 2. Problem Statement: The Transformer architecture, while dominant, is fundamentally constrained by the quadratic complexity of its attention mechanism. This makes scaling to very long sequences computationally prohibitive. Current alternatives, such as linear attention or structured state space models (SSMs), achieve linear or near-linear scaling but have not yet matched Transformer performance, especially on information-dense and discrete data like natural language. There is a clear performance-efficiency gap that needs to be closed. 3. Motivation & Hypothesis: We hypothesize that a key weakness of existing efficient models is their time-invariant nature. Their core recurrence or convolution operations are fixed regardless of the input, which prevents them from dynamically adapting to the content of the sequence. For example, they cannot easily "choose" to remember a specific token from the distant past while ignoring irrelevant information in between. Our central idea is to introduce a selection mechanism into the SSM framework. We believe that by making the model's state-transition parameters a function of the input, the model could learn to selectively propagate or forget information along the sequence dimension. This content-aware reasoning could be the missing piece needed to bridge the performance gap with Transformers. 4. Proposed Method: We propose to develop a new class of models, which we'll call Selective State Space Models. The plan is to tackle this in three parts: (1) Designing the Selection Mechanism: Our primary approach will be to modify the standard SSM formulation ('A', 'B', 'C' parameters). We will make the 'A', 'B', and 'C' parameters input-dependent by deriving them from the input 'x' through small linear projections. This should give the model the flexibility to modulate its own dynamics at each timestep. (2) Overcoming the Computational Hurdle: This input-dependency breaks the efficient convolution-based computation used by prior SSMs. A naive recurrent implementation would be far too slow due to memory bottlenecks. To solve this, we plan to design a hardware-aware parallel scan algorithm. The idea is to use kernel fusion to perform the expensive state expansion and recurrence within the GPU's fast SRAM, avoiding costly read/writes to main HBM. We'll also need to implement recomputation in the backward pass to keep memory usage viable for training large models. (3) A Simplified Architecture (Mamba): We will integrate our new selective SSM layer into a simplified, homogenous neural network architecture. Instead of alternating between attention and MLP blocks like in a Transformer, we will try stacking a single, unified "Mamba" block that combines the SSM with gated activations. This could lead to a simpler and more elegant design. 5. Step-by-Step Experiment Plan: 1. Isolate and Validate the Selection Mechanism: First, we need to test if our core hypothesis is sound. We will create synthetic tasks where LTI models are known to fail but where selectivity should, in theory, succeed. • Selective Copying: Can our model learn to recall specific tokens while ignoring variable-length spans of "noise" tokens? • Induction Heads: Can our model solve this task, which is thought to be critical for in-context learning in LLMs? We are particularly interested in testing if it can extrapolate to much longer sequences than it was trained on. 2. Assess Performance on Long-Context Modalities: If the synthetic tasks show promise, we'll move to real-world data where long-range dependencies are key. • Genomics & Audio: We will train models on DNA and audio waveform data, with sequence lengths up to one million. Our key metric will be whether model performance (e.g., perplexity, BPD) improves with longer context, which would be a strong signal that the selection mechanism is working as intended. 3. Challenge Transformers on Language Modeling: This is the ultimate test. We will conduct a series of language modeling experiments on a standard dataset like The Pile. • Scaling Laws: We'll train models at several scales (e.g., ∼100M to ∼1B+ parameters) and plot their performance (perplexity) against compute to directly compare their scaling efficiency to a strong Transformer baseline. • Downstream Evaluation: We will subject our pretrained models to a suite of zero-shot downstream tasks to see if the pretraining gains translate to common sense reasoning abilities. 4. Quantify Efficiency Gains: We need to rigorously prove our computational claims. • We will benchmark the raw speed of our selective scan kernel against optimized attention (FlashAttention-2) and convolution implementations. • We will measure the end-to-end inference throughput (tokens/sec) and compare it against a Transformer of a similar size to demonstrate the practical benefits of eliminating the KV cache. 5. Conduct Ablation Studies: To understand what makes the model work, we'll dissect it. • Which parameters ('A', 'B', 'C') are most critical to make selective? • How does performance change as we increase the latent state dimension 'N'? • How does our simplified Mamba architecture compare to more complex hybrid designs?