Zergham Ahmed

Jason Yik, Korneel Van den Berghe, Douwe den Blanken et al. · eth-zurich

Neuromorphic computing shows promise for advancing computing efficiency and capabilities of AI applications using brain-inspired principles. However, the neuromorphic research field currently lacks standardized benchmarks, making it difficult to accurately measure technological advancements, compare performance with conventional methods, and identify promising future research directions. Prior neuromorphic computing benchmark efforts have not seen widespread adoption due to a lack of inclusive, actionable, and iterative benchmark design and guidelines. To address these shortcomings, we present NeuroBench: a benchmark framework for neuromorphic computing algorithms and systems. NeuroBench is a collaboratively-designed effort from an open community of researchers across industry and academia, aiming to provide a representative structure for standardizing the evaluation of neuromorphic approaches. The NeuroBench framework introduces a common set of tools and systematic methodology for inclusive benchmark measurement, delivering an objective reference framework for quantifying neuromorphic approaches in both hardware-independent (algorithm track) and hardware-dependent (system track) settings. In this article, we outline tasks and guidelines for benchmarks across multiple application domains, and present initial performance baselines across neuromorphic and conventional approaches for both benchmark tracks. NeuroBench is intended to continually expand its benchmarks and features to foster and track the progress made by the research community.

Zergham Ahmed, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Christopher J. Bates et al.

Modern reinforcement learning (RL) systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex environments, such as video games. However, they still fall short of achieving human-like sample efficiency and adaptability when learning new domains. Theory-based reinforcement learning (TBRL) is an algorithmic framework specifically designed to address this gap. Modeled on cognitive theories, TBRL leverages structured, causal world models - "theories" - as forward simulators for use in planning, generalization and exploration. Although current TBRL systems provide compelling explanations of how humans learn to play video games, they face several technical limitations: their theory languages are restrictive, and their planning algorithms are not scalable. To address these challenges, we introduce TheoryCoder, an instantiation of TBRL that exploits hierarchical representations of theories and efficient program synthesis methods for more powerful learning and planning. TheoryCoder equips agents with general-purpose abstractions (e.g., "move to"), which are then grounded in a particular environment by learning a low-level transition model (a Python program synthesized from observations by a large language model). A bilevel planning algorithm can exploit this hierarchical structure to solve large domains. We demonstrate that this approach can be successfully applied to diverse and challenging grid-world games, where approaches based on directly synthesizing a policy perform poorly. Ablation studies demonstrate the benefits of using hierarchical abstractions.

Zudi Lin, Donglai Wei, Mariela D. Petkova et al.

Segmenting 3D cell nuclei from microscopy image volumes is critical for biological and clinical analysis, enabling the study of cellular expression patterns and cell lineages. However, current datasets for neuronal nuclei usually contain volumes smaller than $10^{\text{-}3}\ mm^3$ with fewer than 500 instances per volume, unable to reveal the complexity in large brain regions and restrict the investigation of neuronal structures. In this paper, we have pushed the task forward to the sub-cubic millimeter scale and curated the NucMM dataset with two fully annotated volumes: one $0.1\ mm^3$ electron microscopy (EM) volume containing nearly the entire zebrafish brain with around 170,000 nuclei; and one $0.25\ mm^3$ micro-CT (uCT) volume containing part of a mouse visual cortex with about 7,000 nuclei. With two imaging modalities and significantly increased volume size and instance numbers, we discover a great diversity of neuronal nuclei in appearance and density, introducing new challenges to the field. We also perform a statistical analysis to illustrate those challenges quantitatively. To tackle the challenges, we propose a novel hybrid-representation learning model that combines the merits of foreground mask, contour map, and signed distance transform to produce high-quality 3D masks. The benchmark comparisons on the NucMM dataset show that our proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art nuclei segmentation approaches. Code and data are available at https://connectomics-bazaar.github.io/proj/nucMM/index.html.