{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-reflexive-integrated-information-unit-a","title":"The Reflexive Integrated Information Unit: A Differentiable Primitive for Artificial Consciousness","arxiv_id":"2506.13825","date":"2025-06-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Gnankan Landry Regis N'guessan","Issa Karambal"],"abstract":"Research on artificial consciousness lacks the equivalent of the perceptron: a small, trainable module that can be copied, benchmarked, and iteratively improved. We introduce the Reflexive Integrated Information Unit (RIIU), a recurrent cell that augments its hidden state $h$ with two additional vectors: (i) a meta-state $\\mu$ that records the cell's own causal footprint, and (ii) a broadcast buffer $B$ that exposes that footprint to the rest of the network. A sliding-window covariance and a differentiable Auto-$\\Phi$ surrogate let each RIIU maximize local information integration online. We prove that RIIUs (1) are end-to-end differentiable, (2) compose additively, and (3) perform $\\Phi$-monotone plasticity under gradient ascent. In an eight-way Grid-world, a four-layer RIIU agent restores $>90\\%$ reward within 13 steps after actuator failure, twice as fast as a parameter-matched GRU, while maintaining a non-zero Auto-$\\Phi$ signal. By shrinking \"consciousness-like\" computation down to unit scale, RIIUs turn a philosophical debate into an empirical mathematical problem.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13825v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13825v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-reflexive-integrated-information-unit-a","repo_url":"https://github.com/refractals/riiu","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"gru","method_name":"GRU"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}