Memristor-based analogue computing for brain-inspired sound localization with in situ training

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 13; no. 1; pp. 2026 - 8
• Main Authors: Gao, Bin, Zhou, Ying, Zhang, Qingtian, Zhang, Shuanglin, Yao, Peng, Xi, Yue, Liu, Qi, Zhao, Meiran, Zhang, Wenqiang, Liu, Zhengwu, Li, Xinyi, Tang, Jianshi, Qian, He, Wu, Huaqiang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 19.04.2022; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 639/166/987; 639/766/1130/2798; Arrays; Brain; Cognitive tasks; Computation; Energy consumption; Energy efficiency; Human performance; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Learning; Localization; Memristors; multidisciplinary; Nervous system; Neural Networks, Computer; Neurons - physiology; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Sound Localization; Training
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29712-8

The human nervous system senses the physical world in an analogue but efficient way. As a crucial ability of the human brain, sound localization is a representative analogue computing task and often employed in virtual auditory systems. Different from well-demonstrated classification applications, all output neurons in localization tasks contribute to the predicted direction, introducing much higher challenges for hardware demonstration with memristor arrays. In this work, with the proposed multi-threshold-update scheme, we experimentally demonstrate the in-situ learning ability of the sound localization function in a 1K analogue memristor array. The experimental and evaluation results reveal that the scheme improves the training accuracy by ∼45.7% compared to the existing method and reduces the energy consumption by ∼184× relative to the previous work. This work represents a significant advance towards memristor-based auditory localization system with low energy consumption and high performance. Sound localization is one of the many learning tasks accomplished by the brain based on the binaural signals of the ears. Here, Wu et al demonstrate in-situ learning of sound localization function using a memristor array, with dramatic improvements in energy efficiency.