arXiv Machine Learning

Building Supervision into Hebbian Plasticity through Spike Agreement

The paper introduces Supervised Spike Agreement-Dependent Plasticity (Supervised SADP), a gradient‑free Hebbian learning rule that embeds class labels directly into spike‑driven plasticity. SADP trains output neurons with a supervised Hebbian rule and hidden neurons by measuring Cohen’s kappa agreement with the correct‑class output spike train, optionally aggregating over temporal offsets (K‑shift). Across six benchmark and medical imaging datasets, SADP consistently outperforms reward‑modulated STDP, achieving higher accuracy (e.g., 86.46 % on MNIST) and faster training (up to 2.86× speedup).

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 27

Local Synaptic Rules Can Implement a SIGReg Gradient Without Backpropagation

arXiv:2607. 21622v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We prove that two canonical local synaptic learning rules, the potentiation arm of spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP$^+$) and homeostatic plasticity (instantiated here via flashlight granule-cell-like neurons), together can implement the exact gradient of a SIGReg-like self-supervised learning objective.

By Martin Andrews
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 16

The Dormant Spiking Neuron: A State-Driven Mechanism for Efficient Spiking Neural Networks

The paper introduces the Dormant Spiking Neuron (DSN), a state-driven mechanism that allows neurons in spiking neural networks to enter a dormant state when their membrane potential falls below a negative threshold. This dynamic gating prunes redundant computations at the instance level and is trained end‑to‑end via backpropagation through time with surrogate gradients. Experiments on static and neuromorphic datasets, including ImageNet, show that DSN reduces computational energy by 40% to over 70% and improves baseline SNN accuracy by 1.34%, outperforming state‑of‑the‑art static pruning methods.

By Ruichen Ma, Yicai Chen, Pujun Zhou, Yue Zuo, Chongyang Li, Shuang Liu, Shaogang Hu, Guanchao Qiao
arXiv AI
Oct 19

SpikeQ: Spike-Guided Post-Training Quantization for Spiking Neural Networks

SpikeQ introduces a spike‑guided post‑training quantization framework for spiking neural networks, selecting weight levels by simulating downstream neurons to minimize spike errors and designing a reset‑aware grid for pre‑fire membrane potential quantization that avoids spike flips. The method outperforms existing grids on seven image‑processing benchmarks, maintaining full‑precision accuracy with 2‑bit pre‑fire potentials and staying within 2.59 points of full precision at 4 bits while drastically reducing memory and energy usage.

By Kai Sun, Peibo Duan, Zhanglu Yan, Guowei Zhang, Yongsheng Huang, Levin Kuhlmann