172,452 research outputs found
Accelerated physical emulation of Bayesian inference in spiking neural networks
The massively parallel nature of biological information processing plays an
important role for its superiority to human-engineered computing devices. In
particular, it may hold the key to overcoming the von Neumann bottleneck that
limits contemporary computer architectures. Physical-model neuromorphic devices
seek to replicate not only this inherent parallelism, but also aspects of its
microscopic dynamics in analog circuits emulating neurons and synapses.
However, these machines require network models that are not only adept at
solving particular tasks, but that can also cope with the inherent
imperfections of analog substrates. We present a spiking network model that
performs Bayesian inference through sampling on the BrainScaleS neuromorphic
platform, where we use it for generative and discriminative computations on
visual data. By illustrating its functionality on this platform, we implicitly
demonstrate its robustness to various substrate-specific distortive effects, as
well as its accelerated capability for computation. These results showcase the
advantages of brain-inspired physical computation and provide important
building blocks for large-scale neuromorphic applications.Comment: This preprint has been published 2019 November 14. Please cite as:
Kungl A. F. et al. (2019) Accelerated Physical Emulation of Bayesian
Inference in Spiking Neural Networks. Front. Neurosci. 13:1201. doi:
10.3389/fnins.2019.0120
CSGNet: Neural Shape Parser for Constructive Solid Geometry
We present a neural architecture that takes as input a 2D or 3D shape and
outputs a program that generates the shape. The instructions in our program are
based on constructive solid geometry principles, i.e., a set of boolean
operations on shape primitives defined recursively. Bottom-up techniques for
this shape parsing task rely on primitive detection and are inherently slow
since the search space over possible primitive combinations is large. In
contrast, our model uses a recurrent neural network that parses the input shape
in a top-down manner, which is significantly faster and yields a compact and
easy-to-interpret sequence of modeling instructions. Our model is also more
effective as a shape detector compared to existing state-of-the-art detection
techniques. We finally demonstrate that our network can be trained on novel
datasets without ground-truth program annotations through policy gradient
techniques.Comment: Accepted at CVPR-201
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