Emergent Self-Attention from Astrocyte-Gated Associative Memory Dynamics
We introduce a Hopfield-type associative memory in which effective connectivity is multiplicatively modulated by astrocytic gains evolving under an entropy-regularized replicator equation. The coupled neuron-astrocyte dynamics admit a Lyapunov function, ensuring global convergence. At fixed points, astrocytic gains implement a softmax-normalized allocation over pattern similarity scores, yielding a mechanistic realization of self-attention as emergent routing on the gain simplex. In regimes of high memory load and interference, the model significantly improves retrieval accuracy relative to classical Hopfield dynamics and recent neuron-astrocyte baselines. These results establish a dynami...
| Authors | Arnau Vivet, Alex Arenas |
|---|---|
| Primary category | physics.data-an |
| Published | 28 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 April 2026 |
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