Pulse-Driven Neural Architecture: Learnable Oscillatory Dynamics for Robust Continuous-Time Sequence Processing

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Sharma, Paras
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Sharma, Paras
author_facet Sharma, Paras
contents We introduce PDNA (Pulse-Driven Neural Architecture), a method for augmenting continuous-time recurrent networks with learnable oscillatory dynamics that maintain internal state evolution independently of external input. Built on Closed-form Continuous-time (CfC) networks, PDNA adds two components: (1) a pulse module that generates structured oscillations $A \cdot \sin(ωt + φ(h))$ with learnable frequencies and state-dependent phase, and (2) a self-attend module that applies recurrent self-attention to the hidden state. Through a controlled ablation study on sequential MNIST (sMNIST) with five random seeds, we evaluate gap robustness -- the ability to maintain performance when portions of the input sequence are removed at test time. Our key finding is that structured oscillatory dynamics significantly improve robustness to input interruptions: the self-attend variant achieves a statistically significant 2.78 percentage point multi-gap advantage over baseline ($p = 0.041$), while the pulse variant shows a 4.62 pp advantage with large effect size (Cohen's $d = 0.87$). A noise control (random perturbation of equal magnitude) provides no benefit, confirming that the advantage is structural rather than merely dynamic. These results provide evidence that continuous-time models can benefit from biologically-inspired internal oscillatory mechanisms for temporal robustness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_00153
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pulse-Driven Neural Architecture: Learnable Oscillatory Dynamics for Robust Continuous-Time Sequence Processing
Sharma, Paras
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
68T07
I.2.6; I.5.1
We introduce PDNA (Pulse-Driven Neural Architecture), a method for augmenting continuous-time recurrent networks with learnable oscillatory dynamics that maintain internal state evolution independently of external input. Built on Closed-form Continuous-time (CfC) networks, PDNA adds two components: (1) a pulse module that generates structured oscillations $A \cdot \sin(ωt + φ(h))$ with learnable frequencies and state-dependent phase, and (2) a self-attend module that applies recurrent self-attention to the hidden state. Through a controlled ablation study on sequential MNIST (sMNIST) with five random seeds, we evaluate gap robustness -- the ability to maintain performance when portions of the input sequence are removed at test time. Our key finding is that structured oscillatory dynamics significantly improve robustness to input interruptions: the self-attend variant achieves a statistically significant 2.78 percentage point multi-gap advantage over baseline ($p = 0.041$), while the pulse variant shows a 4.62 pp advantage with large effect size (Cohen's $d = 0.87$). A noise control (random perturbation of equal magnitude) provides no benefit, confirming that the advantage is structural rather than merely dynamic. These results provide evidence that continuous-time models can benefit from biologically-inspired internal oscillatory mechanisms for temporal robustness.
title Pulse-Driven Neural Architecture: Learnable Oscillatory Dynamics for Robust Continuous-Time Sequence Processing
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
68T07
I.2.6; I.5.1
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00153