Genesis: A Spiking Neuromorphic Accelerator With On-chip Continual Learning

Continual learning, the ability to acquire and transfer knowledge through a models lifetime, is critical for artificial agents that interact in real-world environments. Biological brains inherently demonstrate these capabilities while operating within limited energy and resource budgets. Achieving continual learning capability in artificial systems considerably increases memory and computational demands, and even more so when deploying on platforms with limited resources. In this work, Genesis, a spiking continual learning accelerator, is proposed to address this gap. The architecture supports neurally inspired mechanisms, such as activity-dependent metaplasticity, to alleviate catastrophic forgetting. It integrates low-precision continual learning parametersand employs a custom data movement strategy to accommodate the sparsely distributed spikes. Furthermore, the architecture features a memory mapping technique that places metaplasticity parameters and synaptic weights in a single address location for faster memory access. Results show that the mean classification accuracy for Genesis is 74.6% on a task-agnostic split-MNIST benchmark with power consumption of 17.08mW in a 65nm technology node.