Task-adaptive physical reservoir computing

Abstract

Reservoir computing is a neuromorphic architecture that potentially offers viable solutions to the growing energy costs of machine learning. In software-based machine learning, neural network properties and performance can be readily reconfigured to suit different computational tasks by changing hyperparameters. This critical functionality is missing in ``physical" reservoir computing schemes that exploit nonlinear and history-dependent memory responses of physical systems for data processing. Here, we experimentally present a `task-adaptive' approach to physical reservoir computing, capable of reconfiguring key reservoir properties (nonlinearity, memory-capacity and complexity) to optimise computational performance across a broad range of tasks. As a model case of this, we use the temperature and magnetic-field controlled spin-wave response of Cu$_2$OSeO$_3$ that hosts skyrmion, conical and helical magnetic phases, providing on-demand access to a host of different physical reservoir responses. We quantify phase-tunable reservoir performance, characterise their properties and discuss the correlation between these in physical reservoirs. This task-adaptive approach overcomes key prior limitations of physical reservoirs, opening opportunities to apply thermodynamically stable and metastable phase control across a wide variety of physical reservoir systems, as we show its transferable nature using above(near)-room-temperature demonstration with Co$_{8.5}$Zn$_{8.5}$Mn$_{3}$ (FeGe).