Morphological Learning in Multicompartment Neuron Model with Binary Synapses

There is a vast amount of neurobiological evidence supporting the role of dendritic processing in neural computation. However, most of the neuromorphic chips designed have overlooked these research findings. Here, we present a neuron model with multiple nonlinear spatially sensitive dendrites. Location-dependent processing occurs in multiple dendritic compartments, where sparse binary synapses are formed by utilizing structural plasticity rule. This rule is a correlation-based learning scheme inspired by the Tempotron learning rule to form synaptic connections on the dendritic compartments. The performance of the model is compared with a lumped dendrite model as well as with other classifiers for spatiotemporal spike patterns. The results indicate that our biologically realistic multicompartment model using low resolution weights achieves about 4 - 5% higher accuracy than the lumped scheme and about 2% less accuracy than the Tempotron using high resolution weights, while with 4-bit weights the Tempotron accuracy drops by 5% of our proposed method.