Hyperdimensional (HD) computing is built upon its unique data type referred to as hypervectors. The dimension of these hypervectors is typically in the range of tens of thousands. Proposed to solve cognitive tasks, HD computing aims at calculating similarity among its data. Data transformation is realized by three operations, including addition, multiplication and permutation. Its ultra-wide data representation introduces redundancy against noise. Since information is evenly distributed over every bit of the hypervectors, HD computing is inherently robust. Additionally, due to the nature of those three operations, HD computing leads to fast learning ability, high energy efficiency and acceptable accuracy in learning and classification tasks. This paper introduces the background of HD computing, and reviews the data representation, data transformation, and similarity measurement. The orthogonality in high dimensions presents opportunities for flexible computing. To balance the tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency, strategies include but are not limited to encoding, retraining, binarization and hardware acceleration. Evaluations indicate that HD computing shows great potential in addressing problems using data in the form of letters, signals and images. HD computing especially shows significant promise to replace machine learning algorithms as a light-weight classifier in the field of internet of things (IoTs).
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）
The healthcare landscape is moving from the reactive interventions focused on symptoms treatment to a more proactive prevention, from one-size-fits-all to personalized medicine, and from centralized to distributed paradigms. Wearable IoT devices and novel algorithms for continuous monitoring are essential components of this transition. Hyperdimensional (HD) computing is an emerging ML paradigm inspired by neuroscience research with various aspects interesting for IoT devices and biomedical applications. Here we explore the not yet addressed topic of optimal encoding of spatio-temporal data, su…
Hyperdimensional (HD) computing is a set of neurally inspired methods for obtaining high-dimensional, low-precision, distributed representations of data. These representations can be combined with simple, neurally plausible algorithms to effect a variety of information processing tasks. HD computing has recently garnered significant interest from the computer hardware community as an energy-efficient, low-latency, and noise-robust tool for solving learning problems. In this review, we present a unified treatment of the theoretical foundations of HD computing with a focus on the suitability of …
Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is a paradigm for data representation and learning originating in computational neuroscience. HDC represents data as high-dimensional, low-precision vectors which can be used for a variety of information processing tasks like learning or recall. The mapping to high-dimensional space is a fundamental problem in HDC, and existing methods encounter scalability issues when the input data itself is high-dimensional. In this work, we explore a family of streaming encoding techniques based on hashing. We show formally that these methods enjoy comparable guarantees on …
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Varying contraction levels of muscles is a big challenge in electromyography-based gesture recognition. Some use cases require the classifier to be robust against varying force changes, while others demand to distinguish between different effort levels of performing the same gesture. We use brain-inspired hyperdimensional computing paradigm to build classification models that are both robust to these variations and able to recognize multiple contraction levels. Experimental results on 5 subjects performing 9 gestures with 3 effort levels show up to 39.17% accuracy drop when training and testin…
University of Rome “La Sapienza”（罗马“萨皮恩扎”大学）；Luleå University of Technology（吕勒奥理工大学）；Research Institutes of Sweden（瑞典研究院）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
A change of the prevalent supervised learning techniques is foreseeable in the near future: from the complex, computational expensive algorithms to more flexible and elementary training ones. The strong revitalization of randomized algorithms can be framed in this prospect steering. We recently proposed a model for distributed classification based on randomized neural networks and hyperdimensional computing, which takes into account cost of information exchange between agents using compression. The use of compression is important as it addresses the issues related to the communication bottlene…
Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) has obtained abundant attention as an emerging non von Neumann computing paradigm. Inspired by the way human brain functions, HDC leverages high dimensional patterns to perform learning tasks. Compared to neural networks, HDC has shown advantages such as energy efficiency and smaller model size, but sub-par learning capabilities in sophisticated applications. Recently, researchers have observed when combined with neural network components, HDC can achieve better performance than conventional HDC models. This motivates us to explore the deeper insights behind th…
Thanks to the tiny storage and efficient execution, hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) is emerging as a lightweight learning framework on resource-constrained hardware. Nonetheless, the existing HDC training relies on various heuristic methods, significantly limiting their inference accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new HDC framework, called LeHDC, which leverages a principled learning approach to improve the model accuracy. Concretely, LeHDC maps the existing HDC framework into an equivalent Binary Neural Network architecture, and employs a corresponding training strategy to minimize the tr…
Inspired by the way human brain works, the emerging hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is getting more and more attention. HDC is an emerging computing scheme based on the working mechanism of brain that computes with deep and abstract patterns of neural activity instead of actual numbers. Compared with traditional ML algorithms such as DNN, HDC is more memory-centric, granting it advantages such as relatively smaller model size, less computation cost, and one-shot learning, making it a promising candidate in low-cost computing platforms. However, the robustness of HDC models have not been syste…
Hyperdimensional Computing for Sustainable Manufacturing: An Initial Assessment
School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering University of Connecticut Storrs, Connecticut, USA（机械、航空航天与制造工程学院 美国康涅狄格大学 斯托尔斯分校）；Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ, USA（机械与航空航天工程系 罗格斯大学 新泽西州新布朗斯维爾分校）
Health monitoring applications increasingly rely on machine learning techniques to learn end-user physiological and behavioral patterns in everyday settings. Considering the significant role of wearable devices in monitoring human body parameters, on-device learning can be utilized to build personalized models for behavioral and physiological patterns, and provide data privacy for users at the same time. However, resource constraints on most of these wearable devices prevent the ability to perform online learning on them. To address this issue, it is required to rethink the machine learning mo…
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Wearable and unobtrusive monitoring and prediction of epileptic seizures has the potential to significantly increase the life quality of patients, but is still an unreached goal due to challenges of real-time detection and wearable devices design. Hyperdimensional (HD) computing has evolved in recent years as a new promising machine learning approach, especially when talking about wearable applications. But in the case of epilepsy detection, standard HD computing is not performing at the level of other state-of-the-art algorithms. This could be due to the inherent complexity of the seizures an…
Brain-inspired hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is an emerging machine learning (ML) methods. It is based on large vectors of binary or bipolar symbols and a few simple mathematical operations. The promise of HDC is a highly efficient implementation for embedded systems like wearables. While fast implementations have been presented, other constraints have not been considered for edge computing. In this work, we aim at answering how thermal-friendly HDC for edge computing is. Devices like smartwatches, smart glasses, or even mobile systems have a restrictive cooling budget due to their limited …
Classification of time series data is an important task for many application domains. One of the best existing methods for this task, in terms of accuracy and computation time, is MiniROCKET. In this work, we extend this approach to provide better global temporal encodings using hyperdimensional computing (HDC) mechanisms. HDC (also known as Vector Symbolic Architectures, VSA) is a general method to explicitly represent and process information in high-dimensional vectors. It has previously been used successfully in combination with deep neural networks and other signal processing algorithms. W…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Inselspital Bern（伯尔尼 Inselspital 医院）
This paper presents an efficient binarized algorithm for both learning and classification of human epileptic seizures from intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG). The algorithm combines local binary patterns with brain-inspired hyperdimensional computing to enable end-to-end learning and inference with binary operations. The algorithm first transforms iEEG time series from each electrode into local binary pattern codes. Then atomic high-dimensional binary vectors are used to construct composite representations of seizures across all electrodes. For the majority of our patients (10 out of 1…
Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is an emerging learning paradigm that computes with high dimensional binary vectors. It is attractive because of its energy efficiency and low latency, especially on emerging hardware -- but HDC suffers from low model accuracy, with little theoretical understanding of what limits its performance. We propose a new theoretical analysis of the limits of HDC via a consideration of what similarity matrices can be "expressed" by binary vectors, and we show how the limits of HDC can be approached using random Fourier features (RFF). We extend our analysis to the more …
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；CCDC Army Research Laboratory（CCDC陆军研究实验室）
Hyperdimensional Computing affords simple, yet powerful operations to create long Hyperdimensional Vectors (hypervectors) that can efficiently encode information, be used for learning, and are dynamic enough to be modified on the fly. In this paper, we explore the notion of using binary hypervectors to directly encode the final, classifying output signals of neural networks in order to fuse differing networks together at the symbolic level. This allows multiple neural networks to work together to solve a problem, with little additional overhead. Output signals just before classification are en…
Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) developed by Kanerva is a computational model for machine learning inspired by neuroscience. HDC exploits characteristics of biological neural systems such as high-dimensionality, randomness and a holographic representation of information to achieve a good balance between accuracy, efficiency and robustness. HDC models have already been proven to be useful in different learning applications, especially in resource-limited settings such as the increasingly popular Internet of Things (IoT). One class of learning tasks that is missing from the current body of work…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub（陈·扎克伯格生物中心）
Electromyogram (EMG) pattern recognition can be used to classify hand gestures and movements for human-machine interface and prosthetics applications, but it often faces reliability issues resulting from limb position change. One method to address this is dual-stage classification, in which the limb position is first determined using additional sensors to select between multiple position-specific gesture classifiers. While improving performance, this also increases model complexity and memory footprint, making a dual-stage classifier difficult to implement in a wearable device with limited res…
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Hyperdimensional computing is a promising novel paradigm for low-power embedded machine learning. It has been applied on different biomedical applications, and particularly on epileptic seizure detection. Unfortunately, due to differences in data preparation, segmentation, encoding strategies, and performance metrics, results are hard to compare, which makes building upon that knowledge difficult. Thus, the main goal of this work is to perform a systematic assessment of the HD computing framework for the detection of epileptic seizures, comparing different feature approaches mapped to HD vecto…
Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) is a computation framework based on properties of high-dimensional random spaces. It is particularly useful for machine learning in resource-constrained environments, such as embedded systems and IoT, as it achieves a good balance between accuracy, efficiency and robustness. The mapping of information to the hyperspace, named encoding, is the most important stage in HDC. At its heart are basis-hypervectors, responsible for representing the smallest units of meaningful information. In this work we present a detailed study on basis-hypervector sets, which leads t…
The privacy of data is a major challenge in machine learning as a trained model may expose sensitive information of the enclosed dataset. Besides, the limited computation capability and capacity of edge devices have made cloud-hosted inference inevitable. Sending private information to remote servers makes the privacy of inference also vulnerable because of susceptible communication channels or even untrustworthy hosts. In this paper, we target privacy-preserving training and inference of brain-inspired Hyperdimensional (HD) computing, a new learning algorithm that is gaining traction due to i…
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Long-term monitoring of patients with epilepsy presents a challenging problem from the engineering perspective of real-time detection and wearable devices design. It requires new solutions that allow continuous unobstructed monitoring and reliable detection and prediction of seizures. A high variability in the electroencephalogram (EEG) patterns exists among people, brain states, and time instances during seizures, but also during non-seizure periods. This makes epileptic seizure detection very challenging, especially if data is grouped under only seizure and non-seizure labels. Hyperdimension…
Rice University（莱斯大学）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Research Institutes of Sweden（瑞典研究院）
Machine learning algorithms deployed on edge devices must meet certain resource constraints and efficiency requirements. Random Vector Functional Link (RVFL) networks are favored for such applications due to their simple design and training efficiency. We propose a modified RVFL network that avoids computationally expensive matrix operations during training, thus expanding the network's range of potential applications. Our modification replaces the least-squares classifier with the Generalized Learning Vector Quantization (GLVQ) classifier, which only employs simple vector and distance calcula…
Network Anomaly Detection for IoT Using Hyperdimensional Computing on NSL-KDD
Computer Science and Engineering, Wright State University, Ohio, USA（计算机科学与工程系，怀特州立大学，俄亥俄州，美国）；Computer Science and Engineering, Azad University, Ahvaz, Iran（计算机科学与工程系，阿扎德大学，阿瓦兹，伊朗）
University of Rome “La Sapienza”（罗马“萨皮恩扎”大学）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Research Institutes of Sweden（瑞典研究院）
In the supervised learning domain, considering the recent prevalence of algorithms with high computational cost, the attention is steering towards simpler, lighter, and less computationally extensive training and inference approaches. In particular, randomized algorithms are currently having a resurgence, given their generalized elementary approach. By using randomized neural networks, we study distributed classification, which can be employed in situations were data cannot be stored at a central location nor shared. We propose a more efficient solution for distributed classification by making…
University of New Mexico（新墨西哥大学）；George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）；Villanova University（维拉诺瓦大学）
This paper represents the first effort to explore an automated architecture search for hyperdimensional computing (HDC), a type of brain-inspired neural network. Currently, HDC design is largely carried out in an application-specific ad-hoc manner, which significantly limits its application. Furthermore, the approach leads to inferior accuracy and efficiency, which suggests that HDC cannot perform competitively against deep neural networks. Herein, we present a thorough study to formulate an HDC architecture search space. On top of the search space, we apply reinforcement-learning to automatic…
Graph-Structured Hyperdimensional Computing for Data-Efficient and Explainable Process-Structure-Property Prediction
School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Connecticut（康奈尔大学机械、航空航天与制造工程学院）；U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, Ground Vehicle Systems Center（美国陆军战斗能力发展指挥部地面车辆系统中心）
Intrusion Detection in IoT Networks Using Hyperdimensional Computing: A Case Study on the NSL-KDD Dataset
Computer Science and Engineering, Wright State University, Ohio, USA（计算机科学与工程系，怀特州立大学，俄亥俄州，美国）；Computer Science and Engineering, Azad University, Ahvaz, Iran（计算机科学与工程系，阿扎德大学，阿瓦兹，伊朗）
VS-Graph: Scalable and Efficient Graph Classification Using Hyperdimensional Computing
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA（电气与计算机工程系，乔治·马歇尔大学，弗吉尼亚州 Fairfax）；Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA（橡树岭国家实验室，橡树岭，田纳西州）
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）
Brain-inspired hyperdimensional (HD) computing models neural activity patterns of the very size of the brain's circuits with points of a hyperdimensional space, that is, with hypervectors. Hypervectors are $D$-dimensional (pseudo)random vectors with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) components constituting ultra-wide holographic words: $D = 10,000$ bits, for instance. At its very core, HD computing manipulates a set of seed hypervectors to build composite hypervectors representing objects of interest. It demands memory optimizations with simple operations for an e cient hardware…
University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Siemens Corporate Technology（西门子公司企业技术部）
Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) has emerged as a new light-weight learning algorithm with smaller computation and energy requirements compared to conventional techniques. In HDC, data points are represented by high-dimensional vectors (hypervectors), which are mapped to high-dimensional space (hyperspace). Typically, a large hypervector dimension ($\geq1000$) is required to achieve accuracies comparable to conventional alternatives. However, unnecessarily large hypervectors increase hardware and energy costs, which can undermine their benefits. This paper presents a technique to minimize the …
