A Survey on Hyperdimensional Computing aka Vector Symbolic Architectures, Part II: Applications, Cognitive Models, and Challenges

TL;DR

This comprehensive survey reviews the applications, cognitive models, and challenges of Hyperdimensional Computing and Vector Symbolic Architectures, highlighting their role in AI, cognitive computing, and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides an extensive overview of HDC/VSA applications and cognitive models, emphasizing recent developments and future challenges in the field.

Findings

HDC/VSA are widely applied in machine learning and AI.

The models effectively combine symbolic and distributed representations.

Future research directions include addressing scalability and robustness.

Abstract

This is Part II of the two-part comprehensive survey devoted to a computing framework most commonly known under the names Hyperdimensional Computing and Vector Symbolic Architectures (HDC/VSA). Both names refer to a family of computational models that use high-dimensional distributed representations and rely on the algebraic properties of their key operations to incorporate the advantages of structured symbolic representations and vector distributed representations. Holographic Reduced Representations is an influential HDC/VSA model that is well-known in the machine learning domain and often used to refer to the whole family. However, for the sake of consistency, we use HDC/VSA to refer to the field. Part I of this survey covered foundational aspects of the field, such as the historical context leading to the development of HDC/VSA, key elements of any HDC/VSA model, known HDC/VSA models, and the transformation of input data of various types into high-dimensional vectors suitable for HDC/VSA. This second part surveys existing applications, the role of HDC/VSA in cognitive computing and architectures, as well as directions for future work. Most of the applications lie within the Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence domain, however, we also cover other applications to provide a complete picture. The survey is written to be useful for both newcomers and practitioners.