Delving Deeper into Astromorphic Transformers

Preliminary attempts at incorporating the critical role of astrocytes - cells that constitute more than 50% of human brain cells - in brain-inspired neuromorphic computing remain in infancy. This article seeks to delve deeper into various key aspects of neuron-synapse-astrocyte interactions to mimic self-attention mechanisms in Transformers. The cross-layer perspective explored in this work involves bioplausible modeling of Hebbian and presynaptic plasticities in neuron-astrocyte networks, incorporating effects of nonlinearities and feedback along with algorithmic formulations to map the neuron-astrocyte computations to self-attention mechanism and evaluating the impact of incorporating bio-realistic effects from the machine learning application side. Our analysis on sentiment and image classification tasks (IMDB and CIFAR10 datasets) highlights the advantages of Astromorphic Transformers, offering improved accuracy and learning speed. Furthermore, the model demonstrates strong natural language generation capabilities on the WikiText-2 dataset, achieving better perplexity compared with conventional models, thus showcasing enhanced generalization and stability across diverse machine learning tasks.