Harnessing Slow Dynamics in Neuromorphic Computation
This addresses optimization challenges for neuromorphic computing in embedded, wearable, and implantable systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods.
The paper tackles the timescale mismatch problem in analog neuromorphic systems, where fast circuit dynamics hinder real-time sensory processing, and shows that slowing down dynamics in on-chip spiking neural networks leads to performance boosts on real-time signal processing tasks.
Neuromorphic Computing is a nascent research field in which models and devices are designed to process information by emulating biological neural systems. Thanks to their superior energy efficiency, analog neuromorphic systems are highly promising for embedded, wearable, and implantable systems. However, optimizing neural networks deployed on these systems is challenging. One main challenge is the so-called timescale mismatch: Dynamics of analog circuits tend to be too fast to process real-time sensory inputs. In this thesis, we propose a few working solutions to slow down dynamics of on-chip spiking neural networks. We empirically show that, by harnessing slow dynamics, spiking neural networks on analog neuromorphic systems can gain non-trivial performance boosts on a battery of real-time signal processing tasks.