Towards Training Probabilistic Topic Models on Neuromorphic Multi-chip Systems
This work addresses energy efficiency for researchers and practitioners using topic models, though it is incremental as it adapts existing methods to new hardware.
This paper tackles the problem of energy consumption in training probabilistic topic models like LDA and pLSI by investigating their implementation on neuromorphic multi-chip systems (NMSs), proposing three spiking neural networks (SNNs) that achieve comparable performance to general-purpose computers while being suitable for low-energy hardware.
Probabilistic topic models are popular unsupervised learning methods, including probabilistic latent semantic indexing (pLSI) and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). By now, their training is implemented on general purpose computers (GPCs), which are flexible in programming but energy-consuming. Towards low-energy implementations, this paper investigates their training on an emerging hardware technology called the neuromorphic multi-chip systems (NMSs). NMSs are very effective for a family of algorithms called spiking neural networks (SNNs). We present three SNNs to train topic models. The first SNN is a batch algorithm combining the conventional collapsed Gibbs sampling (CGS) algorithm and an inference SNN to train LDA. The other two SNNs are online algorithms targeting at both energy- and storage-limited environments. The two online algorithms are equivalent with training LDA by using maximum-a-posterior estimation and maximizing the semi-collapsed likelihood, respectively. They use novel, tailored ordinary differential equations for stochastic optimization. We simulate the new algorithms and show that they are comparable with the GPC algorithms, while being suitable for NMS implementation. We also propose an extension to train pLSI and a method to prune the network to obey the limited fan-in of some NMSs.