arXiv Computation and Language

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.

arXiv AI
Oct 12

NeuronSpark: Selective Spiking State Space Models with Adaptive Computation for Language Modeling

NeuronSpark is a self‑attention‑free language model that uses input‑dependent spiking membrane dynamics, allowing each neuron’s decay rate, gain, and firing threshold to adapt to the current token. This selective spiking approach enables billion‑parameter pretraining from random initialization without relying on backbone transfer, conversion, or distillation, achieving competitive zero‑shot performance and a fast–slow hierarchy. On a 1.1B‑parameter, 2.1B‑token training run, NeuronSpark attains a 40.0 eight‑task zero‑shot average, surpasses comparable‑budget Pythia/Mamba checkpoints, and demonstrates significant energy and cycle reductions on FPGA implementations.

By Zhengzheng Tang
arXiv AI
Oct 9

MSGAT: Multi-Head Spiking Graph Attention with Similarity-Space Fusion for Image-Text Retrieval

MSGAT introduces a Multi-head Spiking Graph Attention Network that models structural relationships for image-text retrieval using spike-driven graph reasoning. It employs dynamic attention heads to capture complementary relational patterns and a two-branch multi-granularity fusion framework. The proposed Sim-Fuse strategy aligns coarse- and fine-grained matching relations in similarity space, avoiding interference between sparse spike representations and continuous global features, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on Flickr30K and MSCOCO with significant energy savings.

By Xintao Zong, Wenxuan Liu, Jianhao Ding, Zhaofei Yu, Tiejun Huang
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 Computation and Language
Oct 1

Spike-driven Vision-Language-Action Model

arXiv:2609.39514v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models bridge multimodal understanding and robotic control, advancing the dominant paradigm for embodied intelligence. How...

By Shuai Wang, Malu Zhang, Mingquan Liu, Weihui Dai, Dehao Zhang, Jieyuan Zhang, Yimeng Shan, Zijian Zhou, Yang Yang