Improved robustness of reinforcement learning policies upon conversion to spiking neuronal network platforms applied to Atari Breakout game.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) demonstrates excellent performance on tasks that can be solved by trained policy. It plays a dominant role among cutting-edge machine learning approaches using multi-layer Neural networks (NNs). At the same time, Deep RL suffers from high sensitivity to noisy, incomplete, and misleading input data. Following biological intuition, we involve Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to address some deficiencies of deep RL solutions. Previous studies in image classification domain demonstrated that standard NNs (with ReLU nonlinearity) trained using supervised learning can be converted to SNNs with negligible deterioration in performance. In this paper, we extend those conversion results to the domain of Q-Learning NNs trained using RL. We provide a proof of principle of the conversion of standard NN to SNN. In addition, we show that the SNN has improved robustness to occlusion in the input image. Finally, we introduce results with converting full-scale Deep Q-network to SNN, paving the way for future research to robust Deep RL applications.

Locally connected spiking neural networks for unsupervised feature learning.

In recent years, spiking neural networks (SNNs) have demonstrated great success in completing various machine learning tasks. We introduce a method for learning image features with locally connected layers in SNNs using a spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) rule. In our approach, sub-networks compete via inhibitory interactions to learn features from different locations of the input space. These locally-connected SNNs (LC-SNNs) manifest key topological features of the spatial interaction of biological neurons. We explore a biologically inspired n-gram classification approach allowing parallel processing over various patches of the image space. We report the classification accuracy of simple two-layer LC-SNNs on two image datasets, which respectively match state-of-art performance and are the first results to date. LC-SNNs have the advantage of fast convergence to a dataset representation, and they require fewer learnable parameters than other SNN approaches with unsupervised learning. Robustness tests demonstrate that LC-SNNs exhibit graceful degradation of performance despite the random deletion of large numbers of synapses and neurons. Our results have been obtained using the BindsNET library, which allows efficient machine learning implementations of spiking neural networks.

BindsNET: A Machine Learning-Oriented Spiking Neural Networks Library in Python.

The development of spiking neural network simulation software is a critical component enabling the modeling of neural systems and the development of biologically inspired algorithms. Existing software frameworks support a wide range of neural functionality, software abstraction levels, and hardware devices, yet are typically not suitable for rapid prototyping or application to problems in the domain of machine learning. In this paper, we describe a new Python package for the simulation of spiking neural networks, specifically geared toward machine learning and reinforcement learning. Our software, called BindsNET, enables rapid building and simulation of spiking networks and features user-friendly, concise syntax. BindsNET is built on the PyTorch deep neural networks library, facilitating the implementation of spiking neural networks on fast CPU and GPU computational platforms. Moreover, the BindsNET framework can be adjusted to utilize other existing computing and hardware backends; e.g., TensorFlow and SpiNNaker. We provide an interface with the OpenAI gym library, allowing for training and evaluation of spiking networks on reinforcement learning environments. We argue that this package facilitates the use of spiking networks for large-scale machine learning problems and show some simple examples by using BindsNET in practice.