arXiv subjects

Matthias Jobst

Publications and source records attributed to Matthias Jobst.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The SpiNNaker2 chip: a many-core platform for flexible and scalable brain-inspired computing

In deep learning, efficiency gets more and more important to compensate for the ongoing growth in model sizes and applications. Neuromorphic hardware has long been advocated as an upcoming alternative to deep networks, taking inspiration from the brain for achieving unprecedented energy efficiency. However, demonstrations of these gains only recently began to grow in complexity and real-world applicability. With SpiNNaker2, we present a chip that bridges the gap between deep networks and neuromorphic computing and allows for flexible exploration of computing approaches that combine both worlds. It features 152 processing elements equipped with an ARM M4F processor and dedicated accelerators, an extended SpiNNaker routing fabric for scalable event-based communication and a range of external interfaces for system integration, including Gbit Ethernet and an LPDDR4 memory interface. We demonstrate performance and efficiency of the SpiNNaker2 chip for neuromorphic and deep network workloads, as well as novel event-based computing approaches. For deep network workloads, the chip achieves up to 4.5 TOPS in high performance mode and up to 2.7 TOPS/W efficiency in high efficiency mode for INT8 workloads. The chip supports spiking neural networks with >150000 neurons and >1.8 billion synaptic events/s when simulated with a 1 ms time step. Its low baseline power of less than 250 mW allows for efficiency even under varying workload conditions, allowing to explore sparse and event-based modes of computation. All this demonstrates the chip's capabilities as a universal hardware platform for scalable brain-inspired computing and its combinations with mainstream deep network approaches.

cs.ET↗

arXiv2026

Event-based Neural Decoding for Neuroprosthetic Motor Control

A substantial number of patients experience diminished mobility due to disabilities, diseases, or accidents. Although modern prostheses, powered by deep neural networks, hold the promise of significantly enhancing the quality of life for these individuals, their widespread adoption is hindered by significant latency, energy consumption, and spatial requirements. Wired connections to external high-performance processors restrict patient mobility, while wireless connections limit the volume of information that can be transmitted to these processors. Spiking neural networks offer the potential for compressed communication and low-power inference, yet they often lag behind state-of-the-art deep learning models in various applications. In this study, we propose a high-performance neural decoding method that effectively balances task performance and efficiency. An eventbased gated recurrent unit generates a sparse communication pattern with graded spikes, surpassing classical spiking neural networks in terms of task performance. Utilising an efficient training method and sparse inference, our model presents new opportunities for on-device neural decoding.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Do We Need Bigger Models for Science? Task-Aware Retrieval with Small Language Models

Scientific knowledge discovery increasingly relies on large language models, yet many existing scholarly assistants depend on proprietary systems with tens or hundreds of billions of parameters. Such reliance limits reproducibility and accessibility for the research community. In this work, we ask a simple question: do we need bigger models for scientific applications? Specifically, we investigate to what extent carefully designed retrieval pipelines can compensate for reduced model scale in scientific applications. We design a lightweight retrieval-augmented framework that performs task-aware routing to select specialized retrieval strategies based on the input query. The system further integrates evidence from full-text scientific papers and structured scholarly metadata, and employs compact instruction-tuned language models to generate responses with citations. We evaluate the framework across several scholarly tasks, focusing on scholarly question answering (QA), including single- and multi-document scenarios, as well as biomedical QA under domain shift and scientific text compression. Our findings demonstrate that retrieval and model scale are complementary rather than interchangeable. While retrieval design can partially compensate for smaller models, model capacity remains important for complex reasoning tasks. This work highlights retrieval and task-aware design as key factors for building practical and reproducible scholarly assistants.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

An End-to-End DNN Inference Framework for the SpiNNaker2 Neuromorphic MPSoC

This work presents a multi-layer DNN scheduling framework as an extension of OctopuScheduler, providing an end-to-end flow from PyTorch models to inference on a single SpiNNaker2 chip. Together with a front-end comprised of quantization and lowering steps, the proposed framework enables the edge-based execution of large and complex DNNs up to transformer scale using the neuromorphic platform SpiNNaker2.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Neuromorphic Intermediate Representation: A Unified Instruction Set for Interoperable Brain-Inspired Computing

Spiking neural networks and neuromorphic hardware platforms that simulate neuronal dynamics are getting wide attention and are being applied to many relevant problems using Machine Learning. Despite a well-established mathematical foundation for neural dynamics, there exists numerous software and hardware solutions and stacks whose variability makes it difficult to reproduce findings. Here, we establish a common reference frame for computations in digital neuromorphic systems, titled Neuromorphic Intermediate Representation (NIR). NIR defines a set of computational and composable model primitives as hybrid systems combining continuous-time dynamics and discrete events. By abstracting away assumptions around discretization and hardware constraints, NIR faithfully captures the computational model, while bridging differences between the evaluated implementation and the underlying mathematical formalism. NIR supports an unprecedented number of neuromorphic systems, which we demonstrate by reproducing three spiking neural network models of different complexity across 7 neuromorphic simulators and 4 digital hardware platforms. NIR decouples the development of neuromorphic hardware and software, enabling interoperability between platforms and improving accessibility to multiple neuromorphic technologies. We believe that NIR is a key next step in brain-inspired hardware-software co-evolution, enabling research towards the implementation of energy efficient computational principles of nervous systems. NIR is available at neuroir.org

cs.NE↗

arXiv2023

Deploying Machine Learning Models to Ahead-of-Time Runtime on Edge Using MicroTVM

In the past few years, more and more AI applications have been applied to edge devices. However, models trained by data scientists with machine learning frameworks, such as PyTorch or TensorFlow, can not be seamlessly executed on edge. In this paper, we develop an end-to-end code generator parsing a pre-trained model to C source libraries for the backend using MicroTVM, a machine learning compiler framework extension addressing inference on bare metal devices. An analysis shows that specific compute-intensive operators can be easily offloaded to the dedicated accelerator with a Universal Modular Accelerator (UMA) interface, while others are processed in the CPU cores. By using the automatically generated ahead-of-time C runtime, we conduct a hand gesture recognition experiment on an ARM Cortex M4F core.

cs.LG↗