echo state networks

Echo State Networks with Filter Neurons and a Delay&Sum Readout

Year: 
2010
Authors: 
Georg Holzmann
Authors: 
Helmut Hauser
Type: 
Journal paper
Publisher: 

Neural Networks

Abstract: 

Echo state networks (ESNs) are a novel approach to recurrent neural network training with the advantage of a very simple and linear learning algorithm. It has been demonstrated that ESNs outperform other methods on a number of benchmark tasks. Although the approach is appealing, there are still some inherent limitations in the original formulation.

Here we suggest two enhancements of this network model.
First, the previously proposed idea of filters in neurons is extended to arbitrary infinite impulse response (IIR) filter neurons. This enables such networks to learn multiple attractors and signals at different timescales, which is especially important for modeling real-world time series.
Second, a delay&sum readout is introduced, which adds trainable delays in the synaptic connections of output neurons and therefore vastly improves the memory capacity of echo state networks.

It is shown in commonly used benchmark tasks and real-world examples, that this new structure is able to significantly outperform standard ESNs and other state-of-the-art models for nonlinear dynamical system modeling.

Reservoir Computing: a powerful Black-Box Framework for Nonlinear Audio Processing

Year: 
2009
Authors: 
Georg Holzmann
Type: 
Conference paper
Publisher: 

Proc. of the 12th Int. Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx-09)

Abstract: 

This paper proposes reservoir computing as a general framework for nonlinear audio processing.
Reservoir computing is a novel approach to recurrent neural network training with the advantage of a very simple and linear learning algorithm. It can in theory approximate arbitrary nonlinear dynamical systems with arbitrary precision, has an inherent temporal processing capability and is therefore well suited for many nonlinear audio processing problems. Always when nonlinear relationships are present in the data and time information is crucial, reservoir computing can be applied.

Examples from three application areas are presented: nonlinear system identification of a tube amplifier emulator algorithm, nonlinear audio prediction, as necessary in a wireless transmission of audio where dropouts may occur, and automatic melody transcription out of a polyphonic audio stream, as one example from the big field of music information retrieval.
Reservoir computing was able to outperform state-of-the-art alternative models in all studied tasks.

Master Thesis on Echo State Networks

Year: 
2008
Authors: 
Georg Holzmann
Type: 
Master Thesis
Publisher: 

Institute for Theoretical Computer Science, TU Graz, Austria

Abstract: 

Echo State Networks with Filter Neurons and a Delay&Sum Readout with Applications in Audio Signal Processing

Echo state networks (ESNs) are a novel approach to recurrent neural network training with the advantage of a very simple and linear learning algorithm. They can in theory approximate arbitrary nonlinear dynamical system with arbitrary precision (universal approximation property), have an inherent temporal processing capability, and are therefore a very powerful enhancement of linear blackbox modeling techniques in nonlinear domain. It was demonstrated on a number of benchmark tasks, that echo state networks outperform other methods for nonlinear dynamical modeling.

This thesis suggests two enhancements of the original network model. First, the previously proposed idea of filters in neurons is extended to arbitrary infinite impulse response (IIR) filter neurons and the ability of such networks to learn multiple attractors is demonstrated. Second, a delay&sum readout is introduced, which adds trainable delays in the synaptic connections of output neurons and therefore vastly improves the memory capacity of echo state networks. It is shown in benchmark tasks that this new structure is able to outperform standard ESNs and other models, moreover no other comparable method for sparse nonlinear system identification with long-term dependencies could be found in literature.

Finally real-world applications in the context of audio signal processing are presented and compared to state-of-the-art alternative methods. The first example is a nonlinear system identification task of a tube amplifier and afterwards ESNs are trained for nonlinear audio prediction, as necessary in audio restoration or in the wireless transmission of audio where dropouts may occur. Furthermore an efficient and open source C++ library for echo state networks was developed and is briefly presented.

The audio examples can be downloaded below.

Publication: 
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