Exploiting a Stimuli Encoding Scheme of Spiking Neural Networks for Stream Learning
TECNALIA（泰克纳利亚）；Télécom ParisTech（巴黎电信学院）；University of Waikato（怀卡托大学）；Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM)（巴斯克应用数学中心）；University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU（巴斯克大学（UPV/EHU））
Jesus L. Lobo, Izaskun Oregi, Albert Bifet, Javier Del Ser
Stream data processing has gained progressive momentum with the arriving of new stream applications and big data scenarios. One of the most promising techniques in stream learning is the Spiking Neural Network, and some of them use an interesting population encoding scheme to transform the incoming stimuli into spikes. This study sheds lights on the key issue of this encoding scheme, the Gaussian receptive fields, and focuses on applying them as a pre-processing technique to any dataset in order to gain representativeness, and to boost the predictive performance of the stream learning methods. Experiments with synthetic and real data sets are presented, and lead to confirm that our approach can be applied successfully as a general pre-processing technique in many real cases.
Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）；TECNALIA（泰克纳利亚）；University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)（巴斯克大学(UPV/EHU)）
Unsupervised anomaly discovery in stream data is a research topic with many practical applications. However, in many cases, it is not easy to collect enough training data with labeled anomalies for supervised learning of an anomaly detector in order to deploy it later for identification of real anomalies in streaming data. It is thus important to design anomalies detectors that can correctly detect anomalies without access to labeled training data. Our idea is to adapt the Online evolving Spiking Neural Network (OeSNN) classifier to the anomaly detection task. As a result, we offer an Online e…
TECNALIA（泰克纳利亚研究中心）；Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM)（巴斯克应用数学中心（BCAM））；University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU（巴斯克大学（UPV/EHU））；Télécom ParisTech（巴黎高等电信学院）；University of Waikato（怀卡托大学）；Auckland University of Technology (AUT)（奥克兰理工大学（AUT））
Applications that generate huge amounts of data in the form of fast streams are becoming increasingly prevalent, being therefore necessary to learn in an online manner. These conditions usually impose memory and processing time restrictions, and they often turn into evolving environments where a change may affect the input data distribution. Such a change causes that predictive models trained over these stream data become obsolete and do not adapt suitably to new distributions. Specially in these non-stationary scenarios, there is a pressing need for new algorithms that adapt to these changes …
This study explores the design and control of the behaviour of agents and robots using simple circuits of spiking neurons and Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) as a mechanism of associative and unsupervised learning. Based on a "reward and punishment" classical conditioning, it is demonstrated that these robots learnt to identify and avoid obstacles as well as to identify and look for rewarding stimuli. Using the simulation and programming environment NetLogo, a software engine for the Integrate and Fire model was developed, which allowed us to monitor in discrete time steps the dynamic…
Among the main features of biological intelligence are energy efficiency, capacity for continual adaptation, and risk management via uncertainty quantification. Neuromorphic engineering has been thus far mostly driven by the goal of implementing energy-efficient machines that take inspiration from the time-based computing paradigm of biological brains. In this paper, we take steps towards the design of neuromorphic systems that are capable of adaptation to changing learning tasks, while producing well-calibrated uncertainty quantification estimates. To this end, we derive online learning rules…
The Open University（开放大学）；Technical University of Lisbon（里斯本理工大学）
A model of an Ant System where ants are controlled by a spiking neural circuit and a second order pheromone mechanism in a foraging task is presented. A neural circuit is trained for individual ants and subsequently the ants are exposed to a virtual environment where a swarm of ants performed a resource foraging task. The model comprises an associative and unsupervised learning strategy for the neural circuit of the ant. The neural circuit adapts to the environment by means of classical conditioning. The initially unknown environment includes different types of stimuli representing food and ob…
SparseProp: Efficient Event-Based Simulation and Training of Sparse Recurrent Spiking Neural Networks
Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学祖克曼心智脑行为研究所）；Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization（马克斯·普朗克动力学与自组织研究所）；Göttingen Campus Institute for Dynamics of Biological Networks（哥廷根校区生物网络动力学研究所）
Predictive coding can be regarded as a function which reduces the error between an input signal and a top-down prediction. If reducing the error is equivalent to reducing the influence of stimuli from the environment, predictive coding can be regarded as stimulation avoidance by prediction. Our previous studies showed that action and selection for stimulation avoidance emerge in spiking neural networks through spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP). In this study, we demonstrate that spiking neural networks with random structure spontaneously learn to predict temporal sequences of stimuli ba…
Fast gradient-free activation maximization for neurons in spiking neural networks
Laboratory of Neuronal Intelligence, Institute for Advanced Brain Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University（神经智能实验室，先进脑科学研究所，洛蒙诺索夫莫斯科国立大学）；Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (AIRI)（人工智能研究所）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯克罗夫科技研究院）；HSE University Moscow, Russia（莫斯科高等经济大学，俄罗斯）
The increasing need for intelligent sensors in a wide range of everyday objects requires the existence of low power information processing systems which can operate autonomously in their environment. In particular, merging and processing the outputs of different sensors efficiently is a necessary requirement for mobile agents with cognitive abilities. In this work, we present a multi-layer spiking neural network for inference of relations between stimuli patterns in dedicated neuromorphic systems. The system is trained with a new version of the backpropagation algorithm adapted to on-chip lear…
A robust real-world deployment of autonomous edge devices requires on-chip adaptation to user-, environment- and task-induced variability. Due to on-chip memory constraints, prior learning devices were limited to static stimuli with no temporal contents. We propose a 0.45-mm$^2$ spiking RNN processor enabling task-agnostic online learning over seconds, which we demonstrate for navigation, gesture recognition, and keyword spotting within a 0.8-% memory overhead and a <150-$μ$W training power budget.
Spiking Two-Stream Methods with Unsupervised STDP-based Learning for Action Recognition
Univ. Lille（里尔大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Centrale Lille（里尔中央理工学院）；MR 9189 -- CRIStAL -- Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Signal et Automatique de Lille（里尔信息、信号与自动化研究中心（MR 9189 - CRIStAL））
For energy-efficient computation in specialized neuromorphic hardware, we present spiking neural coding, an instantiation of a family of artificial neural models grounded in the theory of predictive coding. This model, the first of its kind, works by operating in a never-ending process of "guess-and-check", where neurons predict the activity values of one another and then adjust their own activities to make better future predictions. The interactive, iterative nature of our system fits well into the continuous time formulation of sensory stream prediction and, as we show, the model's structure…
Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.（索尼计算机科学研究所）；Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学地球生命研究所）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
Complex environments provide structured yet variable sensory inputs. To best exploit information from these environments, organisms must evolve the ability to anticipate consequences of unknown stimuli, and act on these predictions. We propose an evolutionary path for neural networks, leading an organism from reactive behavior to simple proactive behavior and from simple proactive behavior to induction-based behavior. Through in-vitro and in-silico experiments, we define the conditions necessary in a network with spike-timing dependent plasticity for the organism to go from reactive to proacti…
In this work, we aim to devise an end-to-end spiking implementation for contour tracking in 3D media inspired by chemotaxis, where the worm reaches the region which has the given set concentration. For a planer medium, efficient contour tracking algorithms have already been devised, but a new degree of freedom has quite a few challenges. Here we devise an algorithm based on klinokinesis - where the motion of the worm is in response to the stimuli but not proportional to it. Thus the path followed is not the shortest, but we can track the set concentration successfully. We are using simple LIF …
Boolean functions and binary arithmetic operations are central to standard computing paradigms. Accordingly, many advances in computing have focused upon how to make these operations more efficient as well as exploring what they can compute. To best leverage the advantages of novel computing paradigms it is important to consider what unique computing approaches they offer. However, for any special-purpose co-processor, Boolean functions and binary arithmetic operations are useful for, among other things, avoiding unnecessary I/O on-and-off the co-processor by pre- and post-processing data on-d…
Neuromorphic data carries information in spatio-temporal patterns encoded by spikes. Accordingly, a central problem in neuromorphic computing is training spiking neural networks (SNNs) to reproduce spatio-temporal spiking patterns in response to given spiking stimuli. Most existing approaches model the input-output behavior of an SNN in a deterministic fashion by assigning each input to a specific desired output spiking sequence. In contrast, in order to fully leverage the time-encoding capacity of spikes, this work proposes to train SNNs so as to match distributions of spiking signals rather …
A draft memory model (DM) for neural networks with spike propagation delay (SNNwD) is described. Novelty in this approach are that the DM learns immediately, with stimuli presented once, without synaptic weight changes, and without external learning algorithm. Basal on this model is to trap spikes within neural loops. In order to construct the DM we developed two functional blocks, also described herein. The decoder block receives input from a single spikes source and connect it to one among many outputs. The selector block operates in the opposite direction, receiving many spikes sources and …
Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS-6), Theoretical Neuroscience（高等模拟研究所（IAS-6），理论神经科学）；Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-6), Computational and Systems Neuroscience（神经科学与医学研究所（INM-6），计算与系统神经科学）；JARA BRAIN Institute I（JARA BRAIN 研究所 I）；Jülich Research Center（于利希研究中心）；JARA Jülich（JARA 于利希）；PDC Center for High Performance Computing KTH Stockholm（KTH 斯德哥尔摩高性能计算中心）；Faculty of Biology Albert-Ludwig University of Freiburg（弗赖堡阿尔伯特-路德维希大学生物学院）；Bernstein Center Freiburg Albert-Ludwig University of Freiburg（弗赖堡阿尔伯特-路德维希大学伯恩斯坦中心）
In order to properly assess the function and computational properties of simulated neural systems, it is necessary to account for the nature of the stimuli that drive the system. However, providing stimuli that are rich and yet both reproducible and amenable to experimental manipulations is technically challenging, and even more so if a closed-loop scenario is required. In this work, we present a novel approach to solve this problem, connecting robotics and neural network simulators. We implement a middleware solution that bridges the Robotic Operating System (ROS) to the Multi-Simulator Coord…
We introduce an algorithm to do backpropagation on a spiking network. Our network is "spiking" in the sense that our neurons accumulate their activation into a potential over time, and only send out a signal (a "spike") when this potential crosses a threshold and the neuron is reset. Neurons only update their states when receiving signals from other neurons. Total computation of the network thus scales with the number of spikes caused by an input rather than network size. We show that the spiking Multi-Layer Perceptron behaves identically, during both prediction and training, to a conventional…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Guangzhou Institute of Technology, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学广州研究院）
Spiking neural networks (SNNs), as one of the brain-inspired models, has spatio-temporal information processing capability, low power feature, and high biological plausibility. The effective spatio-temporal feature makes it suitable for event streams classification. However, neuromorphic datasets, such as N-MNIST, CIFAR10-DVS, DVS128-gesture, need to aggregate individual events into frames with a new higher temporal resolution for event stream classification, which causes high training and inference latency. In this work, we proposed a spatio-temporal compression method to aggregate individual…
Spiking neural networks for streaming qubit readout
Ulster University（阿尔斯特大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Walther-Meißner-Institut, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften（瓦尔特·迈斯纳研究所，巴伐利亚科学院）；Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology（慕尼黑量子科学与技术中心）；Zurich Instruments（苏黎世仪器）
The emergence of brain-inspired neuromorphic computing as a paradigm for edge AI is motivating the search for high-performance and efficient spiking neural networks to run on this hardware. However, compared to classical neural networks in deep learning, current spiking neural networks lack competitive performance in compelling areas. Here, for sequential and streaming tasks, we demonstrate how a novel type of adaptive spiking recurrent neural network (SRNN) is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance compared to other spiking neural networks and almost reach or exceed the performance of c…
EEvAct: Early Event-Based Action Recognition with High-Rate Two-Stream Spiking Neural Networks
fortiss GmbH（fortiss公司）；Technical University Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）；Neuromorphic Computing（类脑计算）；Simi Reality Motion Systems GmbH（Simi现实运动系统公司）；Digital Integrated Systems Group（数字集成系统组）
Spiking Neural Network as Adaptive Event Stream Slicer
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Northeastern University（东北大学）；Northwestern University（西北大学）；Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics Co. Ltd.（北京人形机器人创新中心有限公司）；Brain Mind Innovation（脑智创新）
The timing of individual neuronal spikes is essential for biological brains to make fast responses to sensory stimuli. However, conventional artificial neural networks lack the intrinsic temporal coding ability present in biological networks. We propose a spiking neural network model that encodes information in the relative timing of individual neuron spikes. In classification tasks, the output of the network is indicated by the first neuron to spike in the output layer. This temporal coding scheme allows the supervised training of the network with backpropagation, using locally exact derivati…
Hierarchical feature discovery using non-spiking convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has attracted much recent interest in machine learning and computer vision. However, it is still not well understood how to create a biologically plausible network of brain-like, spiking neurons with multi-layer, unsupervised learning. This paper explores a novel bio-inspired spiking CNN that is trained in a greedy, layer-wise fashion. The proposed network consists of a spiking convolutional-pooling layer followed by a feature discovery layer extracting independent visual features. Kernels for the convolution…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
As the third generation of neural networks, spiking neural networks (SNNs) are dedicated to exploring more insightful neural mechanisms to achieve near-biological intelligence. Intuitively, biomimetic mechanisms are crucial to understanding and improving SNNs. For example, the associative long-term potentiation (ALTP) phenomenon suggests that in addition to learning mechanisms between neurons, there are associative effects within neurons. However, most existing methods only focus on the former and lack exploration of the internal association effects. In this paper, we propose a novel Adaptive …
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；University of Applied Sciences Stralsund（施特拉尔松德应用技术大学）
Experimental studies support the notion of spike-based neuronal information processing in the brain, with neural circuits exhibiting a wide range of temporally-based coding strategies to rapidly and efficiently represent sensory stimuli. Accordingly, it would be desirable to apply spike-based computation to tackling real-world challenges, and in particular transferring such theory to neuromorphic systems for low-power embedded applications. Motivated by this, we propose a new supervised learning method that can train multilayer spiking neural networks to solve classification problems based on …
Neuromorphic chips embody computational principles operating in the nervous system, into microelectronic devices. In this domain it is important to identify computational primitives that theory and experiments suggest as generic and reusable cognitive elements. One such element is provided by attractor dynamics in recurrent networks. Point attractors are equilibrium states of the dynamics (up to fluctuations), determined by the synaptic structure of the network; a `basin' of attraction comprises all initial states leading to a given attractor upon relaxation, hence making attractor dynamics su…
University of Leeds（利兹大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Fujian Normal University（福建师范大学）
One stream of reinforcement learning research is exploring biologically plausible models and algorithms to simulate biological intelligence and fit neuromorphic hardware. Among them, reward-modulated spike-timing-dependent plasticity (R-STDP) is a recent branch with good potential in energy efficiency. However, current R-STDP methods rely on heuristic designs of local learning rules, thus requiring task-specific expert knowledge. In this paper, we consider a spiking recurrent winner-take-all network, and propose a new R-STDP method, spiking variational policy gradient (SVPG), whose local learn…
There is an increasing demand to process streams of temporal data in energy-limited scenarios such as embedded devices, driven by the advancement and expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Spiking neural network has drawn attention as it enables low power consumption by encoding and processing information as sparse spike events, which can be exploited for event-driven computation. Recent works also show SNNs' capability to process spatial temporal information. Such advantages can be exploited by power-limited devices to process real-time sensor data. However, m…
Institute of Image Processing and Pattern Recognition, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学图像处理与模式识别研究所）；Knowledge Engineering and Discovery Research Institute, Auckland University of Technology（奥克兰理工大学知识工程与发现研究所）
This paper proposes a new method for an optimized mapping of temporal variables, describing a temporal stream data, into the recently proposed NeuCube spiking neural network architecture. This optimized mapping extends the use of the NeuCube, which was initially designed for spatiotemporal brain data, to work on arbitrary stream data and to achieve a better accuracy of temporal pattern recognition, a better and earlier event prediction and a better understanding of complex temporal stream data through visualization of the NeuCube connectivity. The effect of the new mapping is demonstrated on t…
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have recently gained popularity as machine learning models for on-device edge intelligence for applications such as mobile healthcare management and natural language processing due to their low power profile. In such highly personalized use cases, it is important for the model to be able to adapt to the unique features of an individual with only a minimal amount of training data. Meta-learning has been proposed as a way to train models that are geared towards quick adaptation to new tasks. The few existing meta-learning solutions for SNNs operate offline and requ…
Developing intelligent neuromorphic solutions remains a challenging endeavour. It requires a solid conceptual understanding of the hardware's fundamental building blocks. Beyond this, accessible and user-friendly prototyping is crucial to speed up the design pipeline. We developed an open source Loihi emulator based on the neural network simulator Brian that can easily be incorporated into existing simulation workflows. We demonstrate errorless Loihi emulation in software for a single neuron and for a recurrently connected spiking neural network. On-chip learning is also reviewed and implement…
SSTFormer: Bridging Spiking Neural Network and Memory Support Transformer for Frame-Event based Recognition
School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University（安徽大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）；Beijing Institute Of Technology（北京理工大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；National Engineering Laboratory for Video Technology, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University（视频技术国家工程实验室，北京大学电子工程与计算机科学学院）
Biological neurons communicate with a sparing exchange of pulses - spikes. It is an open question how real spiking neurons produce the kind of powerful neural computation that is possible with deep artificial neural networks, using only so very few spikes to communicate. Building on recent insights in neuroscience, we present an Adapting Spiking Neural Network (ASNN) based on adaptive spiking neurons. These spiking neurons efficiently encode information in spike-trains using a form of Asynchronous Pulsed Sigma-Delta coding while homeostatically optimizing their firing rate. In the proposed par…
Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Z\"urich；ETH Z\"urich, Z\"urich, Switzerland
Spiking silicon cochlea sensors encode sound as an asynchronous stream of spikes from different frequency channels. The lack of labeled training datasets for spiking cochleas makes it difficult to train deep neural networks on the outputs of these sensors. This work proposes a self-supervised method called Temporal Network Grafting Algorithm (T-NGA), which grafts a recurrent network pretrained on spectrogram features so that the network works with the cochlea event features. T-NGA training requires only temporally aligned audio spectrograms and event features. Our experiments show that the acc…
Advancing Training Efficiency of Deep Spiking Neural Networks through Rate-based Backpropagation
College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学信息与电子工程学院）；ZJU-UIUC Institute, Zhejiang University（浙江大学-伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校联合学院）
