Confronting machine-learning with neuroscience for neuromorphic architectures design

Abstract

Artificial neural networks are experiencing today an unprecedented interest thanks to two main changes: the explosion of open data that is necessary for their training, and the increasing computing power of today’s computers that makes the training part possible in a reasonable time. The recent results of deep neural networks on image classification has given neural networks the leading role in machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence research. However, most applications such as smart devices or autonomous vehicles require an embedded implementation of neural networks. Their implementation in CPU/GPU remains too expensive, mostly in energy consumption, due to the non-adaptation of the hardware to the computation model, which becomes a limit to their use. It is therefore necessary to design neuromorphic architectures, i.e. hardware accelerators that fit to the parallel and distributed computation paradigm of neural networks for reducing their hardware cost implementation. We mainly focus on the optimization of energy consumption to enable integration in embedded systems. For this purpose, we implement two models of artificial neural networks coming from two different scientific domains: the multi- layer perceptron derived from machine learning and the spiking neural network inspired from neuroscience. We compare the performances of both approaches in terms of accuracy and hardware cost to find out the most attractive architecture for the design of embedded artificial intelligence.