arXiv Machine Learning

Criticality-Constrained Iterative Pruning for Energy-Efficient Spiking Neural Networks via Combined Importance Scoring

arXiv:2606. 30676v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying spiking neural networks (SNNs) on neuromorphic hardware demands aggressive synaptic pruning while preserving temporal computation integrity.

arXiv AI
2d ago

SpikeMoE: Brain-Inspired Competitive Routing for Flexible Spiking Mixture-of-Experts

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 Machine Learning
Aug 24

Event-triggered Implicit Perturbation for Zeroth-Order Fine-Tuning of Spiking Transformers

The paper introduces an implicit-perturbation zeroth-order (IPZO) architecture for fine-tuning spiking transformers on in‑memory computing (IMC) accelerators. By generating perturbations only for spike‑activated weight rows and combining them with IMC weighted sums, the design eliminates costly read‑modify‑write operations and reduces the hardware footprint of random number generators. An address‑driven XOR recombination scheme (PGU‑XOR) further mitigates spatial correlations, achieving near‑software accuracy while cutting perturbation energy by up to 50% compared to conventional explicit perturbation methods.

By Tengteng Lei, Prabodh Katti, Rashi Dutt, Houssem Sifaou, Tan Peng, Osvaldo Simeone, Kai Xu, Bipin Rajendran
arXiv AI
Jul 15

Burst Spiking Neural Networks

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 Machine Learning
Sep 15

Exploring napping paradigm for Recurrent Spiking Neural Networks

The paper proposes a biologically inspired micro‑sleep technique called napping for recurrent spiking neural networks, combining proportional weight scaling with continuous stochastic membrane activity. Experiments on an unsupervised SNN trained with trace‑based STDP on Gabor‑preprocessed MNIST show that well‑tuned napping can match the classification accuracy of conventional weight normalization while offering different clustering characteristics. The study suggests that napping may be preferable when representational structure is more important than raw classification speed, despite its higher simulation cost.

By Andreas Massey, Stefano Nichele, Aliaksandr Hubin
arXiv AI
Aug 11

SuperNeuroMAT: An Efficient Matrix-based Simulator for Spiking Neural Networks

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

On the second-order optimization for spiking neural networks

The paper introduces SpiKFAX, a second‑order optimization technique for Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) that uses a Kronecker‑factored approximation of the Fisher information matrix tailored to the sparse, discrete, and temporally recurrent dynamics of SNNs. By addressing the sharp loss landscape that hampers training with conventional optimizers, SpiKFAX improves test accuracy and training stability across five architectures and seven datasets. The method offers a computationally tractable alternative to existing curvature‑based approaches for SNNs.

By Ngoc Phu Doan, Ihsen Alouani