Self-organization of an inhomogeneous memristive hardware for sequence learning.

Journal: Nature communications
Published Date:

Abstract

Learning is a fundamental component of creating intelligent machines. Biological intelligence orchestrates synaptic and neuronal learning at multiple time scales to self-organize populations of neurons for solving complex tasks. Inspired by this, we design and experimentally demonstrate an adaptive hardware architecture Memristive Self-organizing Spiking Recurrent Neural Network (MEMSORN). MEMSORN incorporates resistive memory (RRAM) in its synapses and neurons which configure their state based on Hebbian and Homeostatic plasticity respectively. For the first time, we derive these plasticity rules directly from the statistical measurements of our fabricated RRAM-based neurons and synapses. These "technologically plausible" learning rules exploit the intrinsic variability of the devices and improve the accuracy of the network on a sequence learning task by 30%. Finally, we compare the performance of MEMSORN to a fully-randomly-set-up spiking recurrent network on the same task, showing that self-organization improves the accuracy by more than 15%. This work demonstrates the importance of the device-circuit-algorithm co-design approach for implementing brain-inspired computing hardware.

Authors

  • Melika Payvand
    Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich, ETH Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057, Zurich, Switzerland. giacomo@ini.uzh.ch.
  • Filippo Moro
    Institute for Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
  • Kumiko Nomura
    Corporate Research & Development Center, Toshiba Corporation, Kawasaki, Japan.
  • Thomas Dalgaty
    CEA-leti, MINATEC Campus, Grenoble 38054, France. Electronic address: Thomas.DALGATY@cea.fr.
  • Elisa Vianello
    CEA-leti, MINATEC Campus, Grenoble 38054, France.
  • Yoshifumi Nishi
    Corporate Research & Development Center, Toshiba Corporation, Kawasaki, Japan.
  • Giacomo Indiveri