Brain-inspired global-local learning incorporated with neuromorphic computing

There are two principle approaches for learning in artificial intelligence: error-driven global learning and neuroscience-oriented local learning. Integrating them into one network may provide complementary learning capabilities for versatile learning scenarios. At the same time, neuromorphic computing holds great promise, but still needs plenty of useful algorithms and algorithm-hardware co-designs to fully exploit its advantages. Here, we present a neuromorphic global-local synergic learning model by introducing a brain-inspired meta-learning paradigm and a differentiable spiking model incorporating neuronal dynamics and synaptic plasticity. It can meta-learn local plasticity and receive top-down supervision information for multiscale learning. We demonstrate the advantages of this model in multiple different tasks, including few-shot learning, continual learning, and fault-tolerance learning in neuromorphic vision sensors. It achieves significantly higher performance than single-learning methods. We further implement the model in the Tianjic neuromorphic platform by exploiting algorithm-hardware co-designs and prove that the model can fully utilize neuromorphic many-core architecture to develop hybrid computation paradigm.