Topological attention asymmetry in ESM-2 attention implicitly encodes the allosteric hierarchy of the adenosine A2A receptor (opens in new tab)

Protein language models (PLMs) learn complex structural and functional dependencies from evolutionary sequence variation alone. While these models lack a temporal axis, it remains an open question whether their static attention maps encode the directional hierarchies characteristic of allosteric communication. We investigate this in the human adenosine A2A receptor using the ESM-2 transformer. We show that attention heads tuned to functional sites exhibit elevated structural asymmetry compare...