Abstract In materio computing offers the potential for widespread embodied intelligence by leveraging the intrinsic dynamics of complex systems for efficient sensing, processing, and interaction. While individual devices offer basic data processing capabilities, networks of interconnected devices can perform more complex and varied tasks. However, designing such networks for dynamic tasks is challenging in the absence of physical models and accurate characterization of device noise. We introduce the Noise-Aware Dynamic Optimization (NADO) framework for training networks of dynamical devices, using Neural Stochastic Differential Equations (Neural-SDEs) as differentiable digital twins to capture both the dynamics and stochasticity of devices with intrinsic memory. Our approach combines backpropagation through time with cascade learning, enabling effective exploitation of the temporal properties of physical devices. We validate this method on networks of spintronic devices across both temporal classification and regression tasks. By decoupling device model training from network connectivity optimization, our framework reduces data requirements and enables robust, gradient-based programming of dynamical devices without requiring analytical descriptions of their behaviour.
Manneschi et al. (Thu,) studied this question.