arXiv Machine Learning

Matterhorn: Masked Time-to-First-Spike Encoding by Reassigning the Silent State for Sparse and Energy-Efficient Spiking Transformers

arXiv:2601. 22876v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) promise energy-efficient inference for large language models (LLMs), yet most reported savings rely on compute-operation counts that overlook data movement.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

Large Language Models with At Most One Spike per Neuron

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