High-Performance Reservoir Computing With Fluctuations in Linear Networks

Reservoir computing has emerged as a powerful machine learning paradigm for harvesting nontrivial information processing out of disordered physical systems driven by sequential inputs. To this end, the system observables must become nonlinear functions of the input history. We show that encoding the input to quantum or classical fluctuations of a network of interacting harmonic oscillators can lead to a high performance comparable to that of a standard echo state network in several nonlinear benchmark tasks. This equivalence in performance holds even with a linear Hamiltonian and a readout linear in the system observables. Furthermore, we find that the performance of the network of harmonic oscillators in nonlinear tasks is robust to errors both in input and reservoir observables caused by external noise. For any reservoir computing system with a linear readout, the magnitude of trained weights can either amplify or suppress noise added to reservoir observables. We use this general result to explain why the oscillators are robust to noise and why having precise control over reservoir memory is important for noise robustness in general. Our results pave the way toward reservoir computing harnessing fluctuations in disordered linear systems.