Delving Deeper Into Astromorphic Transformers
This work addresses the challenge of bio-inspired AI for researchers in neuromorphic computing and machine learning, but it appears incremental as it builds on preliminary attempts.
The paper tackled the problem of incorporating astrocyte interactions into neuromorphic computing to mimic self-attention in Transformers, resulting in improved accuracy and learning speed on sentiment and image classification tasks and better perplexity in natural language generation.
Preliminary attempts at incorporating the critical role of astrocytes - cells that constitute more than 50\% of human brain cells - in brain-inspired neuromorphic computing remain in infancy. This paper seeks to delve deeper into various key aspects of neuron-synapse-astrocyte interactions to mimic self-attention mechanisms in Transformers. The cross-layer perspective explored in this work involves bioplausible modeling of Hebbian and presynaptic plasticities in neuron-astrocyte networks, incorporating effects of non-linearities and feedback along with algorithmic formulations to map the neuron-astrocyte computations to self-attention mechanism and evaluating the impact of incorporating bio-realistic effects from the machine learning application side. Our analysis on sentiment and image classification tasks (IMDB and CIFAR10 datasets) highlights the advantages of Astromorphic Transformers, offering improved accuracy and learning speed. Furthermore, the model demonstrates strong natural language generation capabilities on the WikiText-2 dataset, achieving better perplexity compared to conventional models, thus showcasing enhanced generalization and stability across diverse machine learning tasks.