Incorporating Learnable Membrane Time Constant to Enhance Learning of Spiking Neural Networks
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have attracted enormous research interest due to temporal information processing capability, low power consumption, and high biological plausibility. However, the formulation of efficient and high-performance learning algorithms for SNNs is still challenging. Most existing learning methods learn weights only, and require manual tuning of the membrane-related parameters that determine the dynamics of a single spiking neuron. These parameters are typically chosen to be the same for all neurons, which limits the diversity of neurons and thus the expressiveness of the resulting SNNs. In this paper, we take inspiration from the observation that membrane-related parameters are different across brain regions, and propose a training algorithm that is capable of learning not only the synaptic weights but also the membrane time constants of SNNs. We show that incorporating learnable membrane time constants can make the network less sensitive to initial values and can speed up learning. In addition, we reevaluate the pooling methods in SNNs and find that max-pooling will not lead to significant information loss and have the advantage of low computation cost and binary compatibility. We evaluate the proposed method for image classification tasks on both traditional static MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10 datasets, and neuromorphic N-MNIST, CIFAR10-DVS, DVS128 Gesture datasets. The experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art accuracy on nearly all datasets, using fewer time-steps. Our codes are available at https://github.com/fangwei123456/Parametric-Leaky-Integrate-and-Fire-Spiking-Neuron.
Code (1)
Tasks
image-classificationImage ClassificationMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Heterogeneous Time Constants Improve Stability in Equilibrium Propagation
Equilibrium propagation (EP) is a biologically plausible alternative to backpropagation for training neural networks. However, existing EP models use a uniform scalar time step dt, which corresponds biologically to a mem…
Ternary Spiking Neural Networks Enhanced by Complemented Neurons and Membrane Potential Aggregation
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are promising energy-efficient models and powerful framworks of modeling neuron dynamics. However, existing binary spiking neurons exhibit limited biological plausibilities and low informat…
Binding kinetics of membrane-anchored receptors and ligands: molecular dynamics simulations and theory
The adhesion of biological membranes is mediated by the binding of membrane-anchored receptor and ligand proteins. Central questions are how the binding kinetics of these proteins is affected by the membranes and by the …
Advancing Direct Training for Spiking Neural Networks with Circulate-Firing Neurons and Learnable Gradients
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged with promising energy-efficient property, yet a substantial performance gap persists compared to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). This gap stems from at least two key limitat…
Binding constants of membrane-anchored receptors and ligands: a general theory corroborated by Monte Carlo simulations
Adhesion processes of biological membranes that enclose cells and cellular organelles are essential for immune responses, tissue formation, and signaling. These processes depend sensitively on the binding constant K2D of…
Dimensionality Reduction