Noise-Assisted Persistence And Recovery Of Memory State In A Memristive Spiking Neuromorphic Network

We investigate the constructive role of an external noise signal, in the form of a low-rate Poisson sequence of pulses supplied to all inputs of a spiking neural network, consisting in maintaining for a long time or even recovering a memory trace (engram) of the image without its direct renewal (or rewriting). In particular, this unique dynamic property is demonstrated in a single-layer spiking neural network consisting of simple integrate-and-fire neurons and memristive synaptic weights. This is carried out by preserving and even fine-tuning the conductance values of memristors in terms of dynamic plasticity, specifically spike-timing-dependent plasticity-type, driven by overlapping pre- and postsynaptic voltage spikes. It has been shown that the weights can be to a certain extent unreliable, due to such characteristics as the limited retention time of resistive state or the variation of switching voltages. Such a noise-assisted persistence of memory , on one hand, could be a prototypical mechanism in a biological nervous system and, on the other hand, brings one step closer to the possibility of building reliable spiking neural networks composed of unreliable analog elements. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.