A burst-dependent algorithm for neuromorphic on-chip learning of spiking neural networks
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The field of neuromorphic engineering addresses the high energy demands of neural networks through brain-inspired hardware for efficient neural network computing. For on-chip learning with spiking neural networks, neuromorphic hardware requires a local learning algorithm able to solve complex tasks. Approaches based on burst-dependent plasticity have been proposed to address this requirement, but their ability to learn complex tasks has remained unproven. Specifically, previous burst-dependent learning was demonstrated on a spiking version of the ‘exclusive or’ problem (XOR) using a network of thousands of neurons. Here, we extend burst-dependent learning, termed ‘Burstprop’, to address more complex tasks with hundreds of neurons. We evaluate Burstprop on a rate-encoded spiking version of the MNIST dataset, achieving low test classification errors, comparable to those obtained using backpropagation through time on the same architecture. Going further, we develop another burst-dependent algorithm based on the communication of two types of error-encoding events for the communication of positive and negative errors. We find that this new algorithm performs better on the image classification benchmark. We also tested our algorithms under various types of feedback connectivity, establishing that the capabilities of fixed random feedback connectivity is preserved in spiking neural networks. Lastly, we tested the robustness of the algorithm to weight discretization. Together, these results suggest that spiking Burstprop can scale to more complex learning tasks and is therefore likely to be considered for self-supervised algorithms while maintaining efficiency, potentially providing a viable method for learning with neuromorphic hardware.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it