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URCHIN: A Horizontal Spiking Language Model for Data-Constrained Pretraining

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 12, 2026 · UTC

The BabyLM challenge measures how much language a model can learn from developmentally-plausible, child-scale data rather than internet-scale corpora, yet prior language models forgo the biological constraints of the neural circuitry that acquires human language: spiking neurons separated into excitatory and inhibitory populations wired by a recurrent lateral connectome. This paper presents URCHIN (Unified Recurrent Connectome with Horizontal Integrate-and-fire Neurons), which applies the Parallelized Hierarchical Connectome Spiking State-space Model (PHCSSM) to language modeling: leaky integr

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Evidence & attribution

First collected: 2026-09-20T12:41:04.663Z. This is not the publication date.