AIBearisharXiv – CS AI · 9h ago7/10
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Retrieval and competition: how a protein foundation model starts a protein
Researchers traced how ESM2-8M, a protein language model, predicts that proteins begin with methionine—a near-universal biological rule. The analysis reveals the model doesn't recognize methionine through direct evidence detection, but rather retrieves it via a distributed computational circuit anchored at the sequence start token. Critically, the model fails on sequences where biology diverges from the statistical default, suggesting that model confidence may not reflect genuine biological understanding.