Beyond Weights: Deep learning in Spiking Neural Networks with pure synaptic-delay training
Biological evidence suggests that adaptation of synaptic delays on short to medium timescales plays an important role in learning in the brain. Inspired by biology, we explore the feasibility and power of using synaptic delays to solve challenging tasks even when the synaptic weights are not trained but kept at randomly chosen fixed values. We show that training ONLY the delays in feed-forward spiking networks using backpropagation can achieve performance comparable to the more conventional weight training. Moreover, further constraining the weights to ternary values does not significantly affect the networks' ability to solve the tasks using only the synaptic delays. We demonstrate the task performance of delay-only training on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets in preliminary experiments. This demonstrates a new paradigm for training spiking neural networks and sets the stage for models that can be more efficient than the ones that use weights for computation.
Code (1)
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
DelGrad: Exact event-based gradients for training delays and weights on spiking neuromorphic hardware
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) inherently rely on the timing of signals for representing and processing information. Incorporating trainable transmission delays, alongside synaptic weights, is crucial for shaping these t…
Co-learning synaptic delays, weights and adaptation in spiking neural networks
Spiking neural networks (SNN) distinguish themselves from artificial neural networks (ANN) because of their inherent temporal processing and spike-based computations, enabling a power-efficient implementation in neuromor…
speech-recognitionSpeech RecognitionSupervised learning in Spiking Neural Networks with Limited Precision: SNN/LP
A new supervised learning algorithm, SNN/LP, is proposed for Spiking Neural Networks. This novel algorithm uses limited precision for both synaptic weights and synaptic delays; 3 bits in each case. Also a genetic algorit…
Hardware-aware training of models with synaptic delays for digital event-driven neuromorphic processors
Configurable synaptic delays are a basic feature in many neuromorphic neural network hardware accelerators. However, they have been rarely used in model implementations, despite their promising impact on performance and …
Three factor delay learning rules for spiking neural networks
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are dynamical systems that operate on spatiotemporal data, yet their learnable parameters are often limited to synaptic weights, contributing little to temporal pattern recognition. Learnab…
Speech Recognition