Master Thesis MSTR-2025-59

BibliographyHaag, Jonathan M.: Online learning with spiking feedback control algorithm on neuromorphic hardware.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology, Master Thesis No. 59 (2025).
67 pages, english.
Abstract

Despite therapidproliferationofdeeplearninginvariouslarge-scaleapplicationsoverthepast decade, deploymentattheedgeremainslimited.Whileedgecomputingo!ers numerousadvantages, including privacypreservationandlatencyreduction,italsoposessignificantchallengesdue to resourceconstraints,particularlyintermsofenergyandcompute.Theprevailinglearning infrastructureforartificialneuralnetworksonvonNeumann-basedhardwareisnotoptimizedfor suchscenarios.Incontrast,neuromorphiccomputingo!ers analternativeparadigmbyemulating the spikingbehaviorofbiologicalneuronsinsilico,utilizinganalogsignalsforcomputationand digital binaryeventsforcommunication.Theresultingmixed-signaldevicesnativelyimplement Spiking NeuralNetworks(SNN),withthepotentialforon-chiplearningandin-memorycomputing, therebysignificantlyreducingpowerconsumption. Despite thefactthatneuromorphiccomputingwasfirstintroducedmorethanthreedecadesago, training multi-layernetworkson-deviceremainschallenging,ultimatelylimitingtheusabilityfor real-worldtasks.AprimaryreasonforthisisthatexistinglearningframeworksforSNNsareeither limited toshallowarchitecturesorrequiregradientestimationonconventionalhardware,neglecting the spike-basednatureofneuromorphicprocessors. This workaddressesthisgapbyimplementinganovelspike-basedsupervisedlearningalgorithm on aneuromorphicprocessor,theDYNAP-SE.Inthisframework,pairsofcontrolneuronsare added foreveryneuronintheoutputlayerofafeedforwardSNN.Thesecontrolneuronsreceive the networkoutputandatargetandusethemtocomputealocalerrorsignal.Throughrecurrent connections, thecontrollersteersnetworkactivitytowardadesiredtargetwhileupdatingsynaptic weightsusingonlyspike-basedinformation,thereforefulfillingthecriteriaforonline,on-device learning. The algorithmisimplementedontheDYNAP-SEusinganin-the-loopsetupandcarefullycalibrated to accountforconstraintssuchasnoise,substratemismatch,limitednumberofneurons,and quantized,boundedsynapticweights.Toevaluatetheapproach,SNNsaretrainedondi!erent classification tasks.Forsingle-layernetworks,thehardwareimplementationcanexactlymatchthe performanceofsimulatedspikingneuronsonconventionalhardware.Formulti-layernetworks,we observeasimilarqualitativeimprovementandonlyasmallquantitativeperformancedecrease.This workunderscoresthecapacityofthealgorithmtoaddressthespecificconstraintsofmixed-signal devices,leveragingtheavailableinformationforon-chiplearning.Itthereforepavesthewayforthe nextgenerationofenergy-e"cient neuromorphiccomputingandonlinelearningattheedge.

Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Simulation Science
Superviser(s)Niepert, Prof. mathias; Staab, Prof. Steffen; Saponati, Dr. Matteo; De Luca, Dr. Chiara
Entry dateNovember 14, 2025
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