Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators

babelfish 134 points 32 comments June 25, 2026
unconv.ai · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (13 comments)

mrr7337

I didn't really understand anything...lgtm

fusionadvocate

Is this somewhat related to reservoir computing?

andybak

When I first learned about computer science at the age of 11 or so (and in 1982 or so) the first page of the text book put digital and analogue computers on what seemed to be an equal footing. And then proceeded to ignore the latter for the rest of the book. Apart from a few notable exceptions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Machine ) I've often wondered about analogue computing.

NopIdoN

> However, the trade-off with our approach is that it requires a more complex loss that operates given only generated samples.

OutOfHere

Can this even make an image having more than one "class"? Can it make an image of an astronaut riding a horse on the moon?

ainch

This method is cool and the post explains it well. It would, however, be good to get more detail on the energy efficiency they flag as their motivation: is this model actually more energy efficient than the comparators they highlight?

TaupeRanger

Really interesting - if I understood the article correctly, they're simulating this on conventional hardware, so in order to get the proposed benefits, it would need to be implemented in some other electronic medium.

italiansolider

Readers care, this requires a nice amount of physics knowledge to really understand. Not too advanced but still, physics.

WhitneyLand

It’s not clear to me how this would ever be practical since it seems dependent on n^2 scaling. You’ve got to wonder when you have an image generation demo why would you possibly have 64 x 64 pixel output as your demo? If I’m understanding this properly to generate a 4K image, you need like 5 trillion point to point connections on the chip. Even if power use from the oscillators is zero that’s going to be an issue.

foax

This kind of reminds me of DCT in lossy image compression, but in reverse.

dimatura

Very cool work - refreshing to see a of different approach. I learned about Kuramoto oscillators many years ago from a book called Sync, by Steven Strogatz, which I highly recommend.

_def

Not at all related but still reminds me a bit of FM synthesis

luciana1u

finally, a way to generate images that's slower AND worse. progress.

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
11,625 stories · 109,460 chunks indexed