No Arabic abstract
Polychronous neural groups are effective structures for the recognition of precise spike-timing patterns but the detection method is an inefficient multi-stage brute force process that works off-line on pre-recorded simulation data. This work presents a new model of polychronous patterns that can capture precise sequences of spikes directly in the neural simulation. In this scheme, each neuron is assigned a randomized code that is used to tag the post-synaptic neurons whenever a spike is transmitted. This creates a polychronous code that preserves the order of pre-synaptic activity and can be registered in a hash table when the post-synaptic neuron spikes. A polychronous code is a sub-component of a polychronous group that will occur, along with others, when the group is active. We demonstrate the representational and pattern recognition ability of polychronous codes on a direction selective visual task involving moving bars that is typical of a computation performed by simple cells in the cortex. The computational efficiency of the proposed algorithm far exceeds existing polychronous group detection methods and is well suited for online detection.
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) has attracted much attention due to its great potential of modeling time-dependent signals. The firing rate of spiking neurons is decided by control rate which is fixed manually in advance, and thus, whether the firing rate is adequate for modeling actual time series relies on fortune. Though it is demanded to have an adaptive control rate, it is a non-trivial task because the control rate and the connection weights learned during the training process are usually entangled. In this paper, we show that the firing rate is related to the eigenvalue of the spike generation function. Inspired by this insight, by enabling the spike generation function to have adaptable eigenvalues rather than parametric control rates, we develop the Bifurcation Spiking Neural Network (BSNN), which has an adaptive firing rate and is insensitive to the setting of control rates. Experiments validate the effectiveness of BSNN on a broad range of tasks, showing that BSNN achieves superior performance to existing SNNs and is robust to the setting of control rates.
Artificial neural networks have diverged far from their early inspiration in neurology. In spite of their technological and commercial success, they have several shortcomings, most notably the need for a large number of training examples and the resulting computation resources required for iterative learning. Here we describe an approach to neurological network simulation, both architectural and algorithmic, that adheres more closely to established biological principles and overcomes some of the shortcomings of conventional networks.
Vibration patterns yield valuable information about the health state of a running machine, which is commonly exploited in predictive maintenance tasks for large industrial systems. However, the overhead, in terms of size, complexity and power budget, required by classical methods to exploit this information is often prohibitive for smaller-scale applications such as autonomous cars, drones or robotics. Here we propose a neuromorphic approach to perform vibration analysis using spiking neural networks that can be applied to a wide range of scenarios. We present a spike-based end-to-end pipeline able to detect system anomalies from vibration data, using building blocks that are compatible with analog-digital neuromorphic circuits. This pipeline operates in an online unsupervised fashion, and relies on a cochlea model, on feedback adaptation and on a balanced spiking neural network. We show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance or better against two publicly available data sets. Further, we demonstrate a working proof-of-concept implemented on an asynchronous neuromorphic processor device. This work represents a significant step towards the design and implementation of autonomous low-power edge-computing devices for online vibration monitoring.
Unsupervised anomaly discovery in stream data is a research topic with many practical applications. However, in many cases, it is not easy to collect enough training data with labeled anomalies for supervised learning of an anomaly detector in order to deploy it later for identification of real anomalies in streaming data. It is thus important to design anomalies detectors that can correctly detect anomalies without access to labeled training data. Our idea is to adapt the Online evolving Spiking Neural Network (OeSNN) classifier to the anomaly detection task. As a result, we offer an Online evolving Spiking Neural Network for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection algorithm (OeSNN-UAD), which, unlike OeSNN, works in an unsupervised way and does not separate output neurons into disjoint decision classes. OeSNN-UAD uses our proposed new two-step anomaly detection method. Also, we derive new theoretical properties of neuronal model and input layer encoding of OeSNN, which enable more effective and efficient detection of anomalies in our OeSNN-UAD approach. The proposed OeSNN-UAD detector was experimentally compared with state-of-the-art unsupervised and semi-supervised detectors of anomalies in stream data from the Numenta Anomaly Benchmark and Yahoo Anomaly Datasets repositories. Our approach outperforms the other solutions provided in the literature in the case of data streams from the Numenta Anomaly Benchmark repository. Also, in the case of real data files of the Yahoo Anomaly Benchmark repository, OeSNN-UAD outperforms other selected algorithms, whereas in the case of Yahoo Anomaly Benchmark synthetic data files, it provides competitive results to the results recently reported in the literature.
Applications that generate huge amounts of data in the form of fast streams are becoming increasingly prevalent, being therefore necessary to learn in an online manner. These conditions usually impose memory and processing time restrictions, and they often turn into evolving environments where a change may affect the input data distribution. Such a change causes that predictive models trained over these stream data become obsolete and do not adapt suitably to new distributions. Specially in these non-stationary scenarios, there is a pressing need for new algorithms that adapt to these changes as fast as possible, while maintaining good performance scores. Unfortunately, most off-the-shelf classification models need to be retrained if they are used in changing environments, and fail to scale properly. Spiking Neural Networks have revealed themselves as one of the most successful approaches to model the behavior and learning potential of the brain, and exploit them to undertake practical online learning tasks. Besides, some specific flavors of Spiking Neural Networks can overcome the necessity of retraining after a drift occurs. This work intends to merge both fields by serving as a comprehensive overview, motivating further developments that embrace Spiking Neural Networks for online learning scenarios, and being a friendly entry point for non-experts.