norse VS Pytorch

This gives you a ludicrous advantage over current neural net accelerators. Specifically 3-5 orders is magnitude in energy and time, as demonstrated in the BranScaleS system https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/science-development/focu...

Unfortunately, that doesn't solve the problem of learning. Just because you can build efficient neuromorphic systems doesn't mean that we know how to train them. Briefly put, the problem is that a physical system has physical constraints. You can't just read the global state in NWN and use gradient descent as we would in deep learning. Rather, we have to somehow use local signals to approximate local behaviour that's helpful on a global scale. That's why they use Hebbian learning in the paper (what fires together, wires together), but it's tricky to get right and I haven't personally seen examples that scale to systems/problems of "interesting" sizes. This is basically the frontier of the field: we need local, but generalizable, learning rules that are stable across time and compose freely into higher-order systems.

Regarding educational material, I'm afraid I haven't seen great entries for learning about SNNs in full generality. I co-author a simulator (https://github.com/norse/norse/) based on PyTorch with a few notebook tutorials (https://github.com/norse/notebooks) that may be helpful.

I'm actually working on some open resources/course material for neuromorphic computing. So if you have any wishes/ideas, please do reach out. Like, what would a newcomer be looking for specifically?

Surrogate gradients and BPTT, this is what is implemented in Norse https://github.com/Norse/Norse. It is also possible to compute exact gradients using the Eventprop algorithm.

That repo is slightly outdated, development now continues at https://github.com/norse/norse.

PyTorch also has some support for them, but it's quite incomplete and has many issues so that it is basically unusable. And its future development is also unclear. https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/60832

TensorFlow

TensorFlow, developed by Google, and PyTorch, developed by Facebook, are two of the most popular frameworks for building and training complex machine learning models. TensorFlow is known for its flexibility and robust scalability, making it suitable for both research prototypes and production deployments. PyTorch is praised for its ease of use, simplicity, and dynamic computational graph that allows for more intuitive coding of complex AI models. Both frameworks support a wide range of AI models, from simple linear regression to complex deep neural networks.

> does PyTorch have a similar concept

of course https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/main/torch/utils/_py...

fyi should work on most 40xx[1]

[1] https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/119638#issuecommen...

Sure, right here: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/main/torch/autograd/...

Here's the documentation: https://pytorch.org/tutorials/intermediate/forward_ad_usage....

> When an input, which we call “primal”, is associated with a “direction” tensor, which we call “tangent”, the resultant new tensor object is called a “dual tensor” for its connection to dual numbers[0].

*My post explains Dot, Matrix and Element-wise multiplication in PyTorch.

In PyTorch with @, dot() or matmul():

import torch # we use PyTorch: https://pytorch.org data = torch.tensor(encode(text), dtype=torch.long) print(data.shape, data.dtype) print(data[:1000]) # the 1000 characters we looked at earlier will to the GPT look like this

AI's Open Embrace Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are increasingly leveraging open-source frameworks like TensorFlow [https://www.tensorflow.org/] and PyTorch [https://pytorch.org/]. This democratization of AI tools is driving innovation and lowering entry barriers across industries.