The paper introduces the Sparse-Activation-ReLU (SAR) layer, a single‑step neural operator that promotes activation sparsity without surrogate‑gradient training and is compatible with event‑based computing. In a trunk‑based NOMAD architecture, SAR improves the combined Latency‑Error‑Energy (LEE) metric by over fivefold compared to Variable Spiking Neuron (VSN) and Leaky Integrate‑and‑Fire (LIF) models. Additional techniques such as synthetic knowledge distillation, a ReLU‑based spiking loss, and graph‑neighbor thresholding further reduce LEE and L2 error on the Heat Exchanger dataset, advancing energy‑efficient virtual sensing for edge deployment.
By William Howes, Farid Ahmed, Syed Bahauddin Alam
arXiv:2607. 11914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central goal of current Spiking Neural Network (SNN) research is to improve their accuracy toward becoming low-power alternatives to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs).
By Jiahong Zhang, Sijun Shen, Man Yao, Han Xu, Mingqiang Huang, Yonghong Tian, Bo Xu, Guoqi Li
arXiv:2607. 08013v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) empowers multiple clients to collaboratively learn a model, enlarging the training data of each client for high accuracy while protecting data privacy.
By Shuo Huai, Di Liu, Hao Kong, Xiangzhong Luo, Weichen Liu, Ravi Subramaniam, Christian Makaya, Qian Lin
SpikeMoE introduces a spike-based k‑WTA router that uses lateral inhibition and refractory periods to select the top‑K experts based on discrete spike counts, inspired by hippocampal CA1 competition. The framework combines spiking neural network dynamics with mixture‑of‑experts conditional computation and adds a two‑stage missing‑modality module for robust multimodal processing. Experiments on vision, language, and multimodal tasks show that SpikeMoE matches or surpasses ANN baselines while offering energy‑efficient performance.
By Xiaoli Liu, Yujie Liang, Jialin Li, Malu Zhang
arXiv:2607. 14086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust and accurate neural decoders are integral to neurotechnologies such as brain-computer interfaces and closed-loop experiments.
By Ximeng Mao, Nanda H. Krishna, Avery Hee-Woon Ryoo, Matthew G. Perich, Guillaume Lajoie
The paper presents a spiking neural network (SNN) approach that uses time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding to limit each neuron to at most one spike per time window, enabling energy-efficient large language models (LLMs). A reference-based strategy is introduced to encode the four core LLM components—embedding layers, layer normalization, attention-related operations, and dropout—allowing the construction of a fully TTFS-based SNN architecture trained end-to-end. Experiments on BERT and GPT-2 show performance comparable to artificial neural network (ANN) counterparts on natural language understanding and common-sense reasoning, while achieving a 1.5‑billion‑parameter spiking LLM and providing an estimate of spike-related energy consumption.
By Zhuoya Zhao, Parsa Omidi, Aref Jafari, Richard Naud
arXiv:2607. 27990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) communicate through sparse binary spike events rather than dense activations, enabling energy-efficient inference on neuromorphic hardware and motivating their use in always-on, battery-powered edge systems.
By Spyridon Raptis, Haralampos-G. Stratigopoulos
arXiv:2606. 20151v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work proposes a hybrid ANN-SNN pipeline that effectively leverages the rich embeddings of pretrained artificial neural networks (ANNs) to enable high-performance spiking neural networks (SNNs).
By Denis Larionov, Khairutin Shtanchaev, Mikhail Kiselev, Mikhail Korovin, Ivan Tugoy
arXiv:2608. 08479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising pathway to energy-efficient AI and brain-inspired computing.
By Prasanna Date, Kevin Zhu, Shruti Kulkarni, Ashish Gautam, Chathika Gunaratne, Robert Patton, Tyler Nitzsche, Ian Mulet, Zachary Johnson-Scott, Addison Helms, Duncan Rowden, Simon Weston, Maryam Parsa, Catherine Schuman, Thomas Potok
Ampere is a new split federated learning system that reduces both on‑device computation and device‑server communication while improving accuracy. It trains device and server blocks sequentially with local losses, eliminating gradient transfers, and uses a lightweight auxiliary network to consolidate activations into a single transfer. Experiments on CNNs and Transformers show up to 11.70 pp accuracy gains, 18.6× faster training, 911× less communication, and 14.5× less computation compared to state‑of‑the‑art SFL baselines.
By Zihan Zhang, Leon Wong, Blesson Varghese
Robust and accurate neural decoders are integral to neurotechnologies such as brain-computer interfaces and closed-loop experiments. Recent work has shown that tokenizing neural data at the spike level facilitates multi-session pretraining and delivers state-of-the-art decoding performance.
Spikformer V2 introduces a Spiking Self‑Attention (SSA) mechanism that removes softmax and uses spike‑based Query, Key, and Value to capture sparse visual features efficiently. It also adds a Spiking Convolutional Stem (SCS) and employs self‑supervised learning (masking and reconstruction) to pre‑train the model before fine‑tuning on ImageNet. The result is the first spiking neural network to surpass 80 % accuracy on ImageNet, achieving 81.10 % with a 172 M‑parameter, 16‑layer model in just one time step.
By Zhaokun Zhou, Yijie Lu, Kaiwei Che, Wei Fang, Keyu Tian, Qihao Peng, Yuesheng Zhu, Shuicheng Yan, Yonghong Tian, Li Yuan