arXiv:2510.12934v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Physical systems that naturally perform energy descent offer a direct route to accelerating machine learning. Oscillator Ising Machines (OIMs) exemplify this idea: their GHz-frequency dynamics mirror both the optimization of energy-based models (EBMs) and gradient descent on loss landscapes, while intrinsic noise corresponds to Langevin dynamics – supporting sampling as well as optimization. Equilibrium Propagation (EP) unifies these processes into descent on a single total energy landscape, enabling local learning rules without global backpropagation. We show that EP on OIMs achieves competitive accuracy ($sim 97.2 pm 0.1 %$ on MNIST, $sim 88.0 pm 0.1 %$ on Fashion-MNIST), while maintaining robustness under realistic hardware constraints such as parameter quantization and phase noise. These results establish OIMs as a fast, energy-efficient substrate for neuromorphic learning, and suggest that EBMs – often bottlenecked by conventional processors – may find practical realization on physical hardware whose dynamics directly perform their optimization.