269,580 research outputs found
Inherent Weight Normalization in Stochastic Neural Networks
Multiplicative stochasticity such as Dropout improves the robustness and
generalizability of deep neural networks. Here, we further demonstrate that
always-on multiplicative stochasticity combined with simple threshold neurons
are sufficient operations for deep neural networks. We call such models Neural
Sampling Machines (NSM). We find that the probability of activation of the NSM
exhibits a self-normalizing property that mirrors Weight Normalization, a
previously studied mechanism that fulfills many of the features of Batch
Normalization in an online fashion. The normalization of activities during
training speeds up convergence by preventing internal covariate shift caused by
changes in the input distribution. The always-on stochasticity of the NSM
confers the following advantages: the network is identical in the inference and
learning phases, making the NSM suitable for online learning, it can exploit
stochasticity inherent to a physical substrate such as analog non-volatile
memories for in-memory computing, and it is suitable for Monte Carlo sampling,
while requiring almost exclusively addition and comparison operations. We
demonstrate NSMs on standard classification benchmarks (MNIST and CIFAR) and
event-based classification benchmarks (N-MNIST and DVS Gestures). Our results
show that NSMs perform comparably or better than conventional artificial neural
networks with the same architecture
Evolving Plasticity for Autonomous Learning under Changing Environmental Conditions
A fundamental aspect of learning in biological neural networks is the
plasticity property which allows them to modify their configurations during
their lifetime. Hebbian learning is a biologically plausible mechanism for
modeling the plasticity property in artificial neural networks (ANNs), based on
the local interactions of neurons. However, the emergence of a coherent global
learning behavior from local Hebbian plasticity rules is not very well
understood. The goal of this work is to discover interpretable local Hebbian
learning rules that can provide autonomous global learning. To achieve this, we
use a discrete representation to encode the learning rules in a finite search
space. These rules are then used to perform synaptic changes, based on the
local interactions of the neurons. We employ genetic algorithms to optimize
these rules to allow learning on two separate tasks (a foraging and a
prey-predator scenario) in online lifetime learning settings. The resulting
evolved rules converged into a set of well-defined interpretable types, that
are thoroughly discussed. Notably, the performance of these rules, while
adapting the ANNs during the learning tasks, is comparable to that of offline
learning methods such as hill climbing.Comment: Evolutionary Computation Journa
An FPGA-Based On-Device Reinforcement Learning Approach using Online Sequential Learning
DQN (Deep Q-Network) is a method to perform Q-learning for reinforcement
learning using deep neural networks. DQNs require a large buffer and batch
processing for an experience replay and rely on a backpropagation based
iterative optimization, making them difficult to be implemented on
resource-limited edge devices. In this paper, we propose a lightweight
on-device reinforcement learning approach for low-cost FPGA devices. It
exploits a recently proposed neural-network based on-device learning approach
that does not rely on the backpropagation method but uses OS-ELM (Online
Sequential Extreme Learning Machine) based training algorithm. In addition, we
propose a combination of L2 regularization and spectral normalization for the
on-device reinforcement learning so that output values of the neural network
can be fit into a certain range and the reinforcement learning becomes stable.
The proposed reinforcement learning approach is designed for PYNQ-Z1 board as a
low-cost FPGA platform. The evaluation results using OpenAI Gym demonstrate
that the proposed algorithm and its FPGA implementation complete a CartPole-v0
task 29.77x and 89.40x faster than a conventional DQN-based approach when the
number of hidden-layer nodes is 64
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