Topic: training performance

Four-month, full-time research fellowship developing machine-learning infrastructure and reinforcement-learning methods. Projects can address training performance, distributed systems, synthetic-data and environment pipelines, or model generalization. Fellows receive researcher mentorship, a weekly stipend and benefits. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis for the next cohort, expected in January 2027. San Francisco workspace access and remote participation from the United States, United Kingdom or Canada are available. A subsequent permanent role is not guaranteed.

Recent advances in neuromorphic hardware and Surrogate Gradient (SG) learning highlight the potential of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) for energy-efficient signal processing and learning. Like in Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), training performance in SNNs strongly depends on the initialization of synaptic and neuronal parameters. While there are established methods of initializing deep ANNs for high performance, effective strategies for optimal SNN initialization are lacking. Here, we address this gap and propose flexible data-dependent initialization strategies for SNNs.

The brain has a hugely diverse and heterogeneous nature. The exact role of heterogeneity has been relatively little explored as most neural models tend to be largely homogeneous. We trained spiking neural networks with varying degrees of heterogeneity on complex real-world tasks and found that heterogeneity resulted in more stable and robust training and improved training performance, especially for tasks with a higher temporal structure. Moreover, the optimal distribution of parameters found by training was found to be similar to experimental observations. These findings suggest that heteroge