Protein contacts are already in the attention: a single-forward-pass alternative to the Categorical Jacobian
The Categorical Jacobian of Zhang et al. (2024) reads protein contacts from a language model by perturbing every residue with every alternative amino acid, about $19L$ forward passes. We show the signal it reconstructs is already concentrated in a small subset of attention heads: averaging the top-$K$ contact-relevant heads -- selected on as few as 10 labeled proteins, with no fitted per-pair or per-head weights -- recovers contacts in a single forward pass and matches or beats the Categorical Jacobian for every bidirectional model where it is defined (bar the smallest, 8M). Our primary test is leakage-clean: on a CAMEO split where neither selection nor evaluation touches data the models ...
| Authors | Rome Thorstenson |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 20 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 June 2026 |
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