428 research outputs found
Addressing limited weight resolution in a fully optical neuromorphic reservoir computing readout
Abstract Using optical hardware for neuromorphic computing has become more and more popular recently, due to its efficient high-speed data processing capabilities and low power consumption. However, there are still some remaining obstacles to realizing the vision of a completely optical neuromorphic computer. One of them is that, depending on the technology used, optical weighting elements may not share the same resolution as in the electrical domain. Moreover, noise of the weighting elements are important considerations as well. In this article, we investigate a new method for improving the performance of optical weighting components, even in the presence of noise and in the case of very low resolution. Our method utilizes an iterative training procedure and is able to select weight connections that are more robust to quantization and noise. As a result, even with only 8 to 32 levels of resolution, in noisy weighting environments, the method can outperform both nearest rounding low-resolution weighting and random rounding weighting by up to several orders of magnitude in terms of bit error rate and can deliver performance very close to full-resolution weighting elements
Photontorch: simulation and optimization of large photonic circuits using the deep learning framework PyTorch
Simulating self-learning in photorefractive optical reservoir computers
Photorefractive materials exhibit an interesting plasticity under the influence of an optical field. By extending the finite-difference time-domain method to include the photorefractive effect, we explore how this property can be exploited in the context of neuromorphic computing for telecom applications. By first priming the photorefractive material with a random bit stream, the material reorganizes itself to better recognize simple patterns in the stream. We demonstrate this by simulating a typical reservoir computing setup, which gets a significant performance boost on performing the XOR on two consecutive bits in the stream after this initial priming step
Highly parallel simulation and optimization of photonic circuits in time and frequency domain based on the deep-learning framework PyTorch
- …
