The paper presents a convex formulation for training spiking neural networks (SNNs), showing that the weight‑decay‑regularized training problem for a class of threshold RNNs—including leaky integrate‑and‑fire SNNs—has zero duality gap and matches a convex program’s optimal value. To handle the exponential size of the resulting convex programs, the authors introduce a randomized surrogate with a high‑probability approximation guarantee. Empirical results demonstrate that the convex variant outperforms surrogate‑gradient training on addition and first‑last‑XOR tasks, matches performance on sequential MNIST, and falls slightly behind a reservoir baseline on base‑3 and base‑5 addition.
arXiv:2605. 08022v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been proposed as biologically plausible and energy-efficient alternatives to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs).
arXiv:2605.30361v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer compelling energy efficiency on neuromorphic hardware, yet their training remains challenging because th...
arXiv:2606. 11236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training deep spiking neural networks (SNNs) remains challenging due to sharp loss landscapes and temporal inconsistency caused by surrogate gradients.
arXiv:2608. 13702v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer an energy-efficient alternative to conventional deep neural networks by exploiting sparse event-driven computation, but their training remains challenging because the non-differentiable spike function requires surrogate gradients whose fixed shape may be suboptimal across layers and training stages.
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.
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.
The paper demonstrates that for a broad class of spiking neuron models, including the leaky integrate‑and‑fire with subtractive reset, any approximation bound proven for multi‑spike networks can be translated to an equivalent single‑spike network with only a linear change in neuron count, and vice versa. This establishes that single‑spike and multi‑spike neural networks possess identical approximation capabilities for general machine learning tasks. Consequently, existing approximation results for single‑spike networks automatically extend to the multi‑spike case.
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.
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.
arXiv:2512. 02342v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The stochastic Polyak step size (SPS) has proven to be a promising choice for stochastic gradient descent (SGD), delivering competitive performance relative to state-of-the-art methods on smooth convex and non-convex optimization problems, including deep neural network training.
arXiv:2609.26167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation-energy pruning -- removing weights whose product of magnitude and cumulative pre-synaptic spike count falls below a threshold -- was establi...
arXiv:2604. 08894v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer superior energy efficiency over Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs).