Paper
Federated Few-Shot Learning on Neuromorphic Hardware: An Empirical Study Across Physical Edge Nodes
Authors
Steven Motta, Gioele Nanni
Abstract
Federated learning on neuromorphic hardware remains unexplored because on-chip spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) produces binary weight updates rather than the floating-point gradients assumed by standard algorithms. We build a two-node federated system with BrainChip Akida AKD1000 processors and run approximately 1,580 experimental trials across seven analysis phases. Of four weight-exchange strategies tested, neuron-level concatenation (FedUnion) consistently preserves accuracy while element-wise weight averaging (FedAvg) destroys it (p = 0.002). Domain-adaptive fine-tuning of the upstream feature extractor accounts for most of the accuracy gains, confirming feature quality as the dominant factor. Scaling feature dimensionality from 64 to 256 yields 77.0% best-strategy federated accuracy (n=30, p < 0.001). Two independent asymmetries (wider features help federation more than individual learning, while binarization hurts federation more) point to a shared prototype complementarity mechanism: cross-node transfer scales with the distinctiveness of neuron prototypes.
Metadata
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Raw Data (Debug)
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