Neuromorphic adaptations of restricted Boltzmann machines and deep belief networks

Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) and Deep Belief Networks (DBNs) have been demonstrated to perform efficiently on a variety of applications, such as dimensionality reduction and classification. Implementation of RBMs on neuromorphic platforms, which emulate large-scale networks of spiking neurons, has significant advantages from concurrency and low-power perspectives. This work outlines a neuromorphic adaptation of the RBM, which uses a recently proposed neural sampling algorithm (Buesing et al. 2011), and examines its algorithmic efficiency. Results show the feasibility of such alterations, which will serve as a guide for future implementation of such algorithms in neuromorphic very large scale integration (VLSI) platforms.