Understanding And Bridging The Gap Between Neuromorphic Computing And Machine Learning Volume Ii

Towards the long-standing dream of artificial intelligence, two solution paths have been paved: (i) neuroscience-driven neuromorphic computing; (ii) computer science-driven machine learning. The former targets at harnessing neuroscience to obtain insights for brain-like processing, by studying the detailed implementation of neural dynamics, circuits, coding and learning. Although our understanding of how the brain works is still very limited, this bio-plausible way offers an appealing promise for future general intelligence. In contrast, the latter aims at solving practical tasks typically formulated as a cost function with high accuracy, by eschewing most neuroscience details in favor of brute force optimization and feeding a large volume of data. With the help of big data (e.g. ImageNet), high-performance processors (e.g. GPU, TPU), effective training algorithms (e.g. artificial neural networks with gradient descent training), and easy-to-use design tools (e.g. Pytorch, Tensorflow), machine learning has achieved superior performance in a broad spectrum of scenarios. Although acclaimed for the biological plausibility and the low power advantage (benefit from the spike signals and event-driven processing), there are ongoing debates and skepticisms about neuromorphic computing since it usually performs worse than machine learning in practical tasks especially in terms of the accuracy.