Learning reservoir dynamics with temporal self-modulation

Reservoir computing (RC) can efficiently process time-series data by mapping the input signal into a high-dimensional space via randomly connected recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which are referred to as a reservoir. The high-dimensional representation of time-series data in the reservoir simplifies subsequent learning tasks. Although this simple architecture allows fast learning and facile physical implementation, the learning performance is inferior to that of other state-of-the-art RNN models. In this study, to improve the learning ability of RC, we propose self-modulated RC (SM-RC) that extends RC by adding a self-modulation mechanism. SM-RC can perform attention tasks where input information is retained or discarded depending on the input signal. We find that a chaotic state can emerge as a result of learning in SM-RC. Furthermore, we demonstrate that SM-RC outperforms RC in NARMA and Lorenz model tasks. Because the SM-RC architecture only requires two additional gates, it is physically implementable as RC, thereby providing a direction for realizing edge artificial intelligence.