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Main Authors: Buckley, Thomas, Schumm, Leslie, Askenazi, Manor, Rietman, Edward
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00207
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author Buckley, Thomas
Schumm, Leslie
Askenazi, Manor
Rietman, Edward
author_facet Buckley, Thomas
Schumm, Leslie
Askenazi, Manor
Rietman, Edward
contents In this paper we extend our earlier work of (Rietman et al. 2022) presenting an application of physical Reservoir Computing (RC) to the classification of handwritten and spoken digits. We utilize an unpoled cube of Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT) as a computational substrate to process these datasets. Our results demonstrate that the PZT reservoir achieves 89.0% accuracy on MNIST handwritten digits, representing a 2.4 percentage point improvement over logistic regression baselines applied to the same preprocessed data. However, for the AudioMNIST spoken digits dataset, the reservoir system (88.2% accuracy) performs equivalently to baseline methods (88.1% accuracy), suggesting that reservoir computing provides the greatest benefits for classification tasks of intermediate difficulty where linear methods underperform but the problem remains learnable. PZT is a well-known material already used in semiconductor applications, presenting a low-power computational substrate that can be integrated with digital algorithms. Our findings indicate that physical reservoirs excel when the task difficulty exceeds the capability of simple linear classifiers but remains within the computational capacity of the reservoir dynamics.
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Lead Zirconate Titanate Reservoir Computing for Classification of Written and Spoken Digits
Buckley, Thomas
Schumm, Leslie
Askenazi, Manor
Rietman, Edward
Machine Learning
In this paper we extend our earlier work of (Rietman et al. 2022) presenting an application of physical Reservoir Computing (RC) to the classification of handwritten and spoken digits. We utilize an unpoled cube of Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT) as a computational substrate to process these datasets. Our results demonstrate that the PZT reservoir achieves 89.0% accuracy on MNIST handwritten digits, representing a 2.4 percentage point improvement over logistic regression baselines applied to the same preprocessed data. However, for the AudioMNIST spoken digits dataset, the reservoir system (88.2% accuracy) performs equivalently to baseline methods (88.1% accuracy), suggesting that reservoir computing provides the greatest benefits for classification tasks of intermediate difficulty where linear methods underperform but the problem remains learnable. PZT is a well-known material already used in semiconductor applications, presenting a low-power computational substrate that can be integrated with digital algorithms. Our findings indicate that physical reservoirs excel when the task difficulty exceeds the capability of simple linear classifiers but remains within the computational capacity of the reservoir dynamics.
title Lead Zirconate Titanate Reservoir Computing for Classification of Written and Spoken Digits
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00207