EqSpike: Spike-driven Equilibrium Propagation for Neuromorphic Implementations
Erwann Martin a, Maxence Ernoult b c, Jérémie Laydevant b, Shuai Li b, Damien Querlioz c, Teodora Petrisor a, Julie Grollier b
a Thales Research and Technology, 91767 Palaiseau, France
b Unité Mixte de Physique, CNRS, Thales, Université Paris-Saclay, 91767 Palaiseau, France
c Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies, 91120 Palaiseau, France
Proceedings of Neuromorphic Materials, Devices, Circuits and Systems (NeuMatDeCaS)
VALÈNCIA, Spain, 2023 January 23rd - 25th
Organizers: Rohit Abraham John, Irem Boybat, Jason Eshraghian and Simone Fabiano
Invited Speaker, Julie Grollier, presentation 061
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.neumatdecas.2023.061
Publication date: 9th January 2023

Neuromorphic systems achieve high energy efficiency by computing with spikes, in a brain-inspired way. However, finding spike-based learning algorithms that can be implemented within the local constraints of neuromorphic systems, while achieving high accuracy, remains a formidable challenge. Equilibrium Propagation is a hardware-friendly counterpart of backpropagation which only involves spatially local computations and applies to recurrent neural networks with static inputs. So far, hardware-oriented studies of Equilibrium Propagation focused on rate-based networks. In this work, we develop a spiking neural network algorithm called EqSpike, compatible with neuromorphic systems, which learns by Equilibrium Propagation. Through simulations, we obtain a test recognition accuracy of 96.9% on MNIST, similar to rate-based Equilibrium Propagation, and comparing favourably to alternative learning techniques for spiking neural networks. We show that EqSpike implemented in silicon neuromorphic technology could reduce the energy consumption of inference by up to three orders of magnitude and training by up to two orders of magnitude compared to GPUs. Finally, we also show that during learning, EqSpike weight updates exhibit a form of Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity, highlighting a possible connection with biology.

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