Intra-neuronal attention within language models Relationships between activation and semantics

This study investigates the ability of perceptron-type neurons in language models to perform intra-neuronal attention; that is, to identify different homogeneous categorical segments within the synthetic thought category they encode, based on a segmentation of specific activation zones for the tokens to which they are particularly responsive. The objective of this work is therefore to determine to what extent formal neurons can establish a homomorphic relationship between activation-based and categorical segmentations. The results suggest the existence of such a relationship, albeit tenuous, only at the level of tokens with very high activation levels. This intra-neuronal attention subsequently enables categorical restructuring processes at the level of neurons in the following layer, thereby contributing to the progressive formation of high-level categorical abstractions.

Publication Details

Journal
ArXiv.org
Published
2025-03-17
Primary Topic
Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
Type
article
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article

Intra-neuronal attention within language models Relationships between activation and semantics

ArXiv.org
Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
article

Intra-neuronal attention within language models Relationships between activation and semantics

article en

Abstract

This study investigates the ability of perceptron-type neurons in language models to perform intra-neuronal attention; that is, to identify different homogeneous categorical segments within the synthetic thought category they encode, based on a segmentation of specific activation zones for the tokens to which they are particularly responsive. The objective of this work is therefore to determine to what extent formal neurons can establish a homomorphic relationship between activation-based and categorical segmentations. The results suggest the existence of such a relationship, albeit tenuous, only at the level of tokens with very high activation levels. This intra-neuronal attention subsequently enables categorical restructuring processes at the level of neurons in the following layer, thereby contributing to the progressive formation of high-level categorical abstractions.

ArXiv.org
Openalex Percentile: Top 47%
Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
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Intra-neuronal attention within language models Relationships between activation and semantics · ArXiv.org (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS