Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promoted as an energy-efficient substrate because sparse, event-driven activity replaces dense multiply-accumulates with cheap accumulates. We argue the energy dividend of sparsity is not a property of SNNs but of the task.
arXiv:2607. 26648v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promoted as an energy-efficient substrate because sparse, event-driven activity replaces dense multiply-accumulates with cheap accumulates.
By Zeyu Wang
arXiv:2606. 03026v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spiking language models expose activation sparsity that dense Transformer runtimes do not directly exploit.
By Ting Liu
arXiv:2605.21333v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Natively trained spiking language models must preserve information across time while operating through sparse binary activations, a combinati...
By Ting Liu
arXiv:2409. 08290v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) promise higher energy efficiency over conventional Quantized Artificial Neural Networks (QNNs) due to their event-driven, spike-based computation.
By Zhanglu Yan, Zhenyu Bai, Kaiwen Tang, Weng-Fai Wong
arXiv:2604. 08894v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer superior energy efficiency over Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs).
By Zecheng Hao, Shenghao Xie, Kang Chen, Wenxuan Liu, Zhaofei Yu, Tiejun Huang
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:2606. 13016v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising for energy-efficient inference, and time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding is especially attractive because each neuron fires at most once.
By Zhanglu Yan, Jiayi Mao, Kaiwen Tang, Fanfan Li, Gang Pan, Tao Luo, Bowen Zhu, Qianhui Liu, Weng-Fai Wong
arXiv:2605. 21333v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Natively trained spiking language models must preserve information across time while operating through sparse binary activations, a combination that has produced a persistent quality gap relative to dense Transformers.
By Ting Liu
arXiv:2607. 14672v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous-time spiking neural networks (SNNs) provide an event-driven framework for temporal computation, computational neuroscience, and neuromorphic hardware.
By Yusuke Sakemi, Tomoya Takeuchi, Takeo Hosomi, Kazuyuki Aihara
arXiv:2609.21583v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Feedforward Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) typically propagate every generated spike indiscriminately, disregarding whether the information is redund...
By Aidin Attar, Michele Rossi
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