HyperSeed: Unsupervised Learning with Vector Symbolic Architectures

Motivated by recent innovations in biologically-inspired neuromorphic hardware, this paper presents a novel unsupervised machine learning approach named Hyperseed that leverages Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSA) for fast learning a topology preserving feature map of unlabelled data. It relies on two major capabilities of VSAs: the binding operation and computing in superposition. In this paper, we introduce the algorithmic part of Hyperseed expressed within Fourier Holographic Reduced Representations VSA model, which is specifically suited for implementation on spiking neuromorphic hardware. The two distinctive novelties of the Hyperseed algorithm are: 1) Learning from only few input data samples and 2) A learning rule based on a single vector operation. These properties are demonstrated on synthetic datasets as well as on illustrative benchmark use-cases, IRIS classification and a language identification task using n-gram statistics.