To Spike or Not to Spike, that is the Question
Neuromorphic computing has recently gained momentum with the emergence of various neuromorphic processors. As the field advances, there is an increasing focus on developing training methods that can effectively leverage the unique properties of spiking neural networks (SNNs). SNNs emulate the temporal dynamics of biological neurons, making them particularly well-suited for real-time, event-driven processing. To fully harness the potential of SNNs across different neuromorphic platforms, effective training methodologies are essential. In SNNs, learning rules are based on neurons' spiking behavior, that is, if and when spikes are generated due to a neuron's membrane potential exceeding that neuron's spiking threshold, and this spike timing encodes vital information. However, the threshold is generally treated as a hyperparameter, and incorrect selection can lead to neurons that do not spike for large portions of the training process, hindering the effective rate of learning. This work focuses on the significance of learning neuron thresholds alongside weights in SNNs. Our results suggest that promoting threshold from a hyperparameter to a trainable parameter effectively addresses the issue of dead neurons during training. This leads to a more robust training algorithm, resulting in improved convergence, increased test accuracy, and a substantial reduction in the number of training epochs required to achieve viable accuracy on spatiotemporal datasets such as NMNIST, DVS128, and Spiking Heidelberg Digits (SHD), with up to 30% training speed-up and up to 2% higher accuracy on these datasets.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Methods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Circumstantial evidence and explanatory models for synapses in large-scale spike recordings
Whether, when, and how causal interactions between neurons can be meaningfully studied from observations of neural activity alone are vital questions in neural data analysis. Here we aim to better outline the concept of …
Functional ConnectivityTo Deconvolve, or Not to Deconvolve: Inferences of Neuronal Activities using Calcium Imaging Data
With the increasing popularity of calcium imaging data in neuroscience research, methods for analyzing calcium trace data are critical to address various questions. The observed calcium traces are either analyzed directl…
ClusteringSpike-driven Large Language Model
Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are primarily based on large-scale dense matrix multiplications. Inspired by the brain's information processing mechanism, we explore the fundamental question: how to effectively inte…
An algebraic approach to spike-time neural codes in the hippocampus
Although temporal coding through spike-time patterns has long been of interest in neuroscience, the specific structures that could be useful for spike-time codes remain highly unclear. Here, we introduce a new analytical…
HippocampusOpen-Ended Question AnsweringWhich spike train distance is most suitable for distinguishing rate and temporal coding?
Background: It is commonly assumed in neuronal coding that repeated presentations of a stimulus to a coding neuron elicit similar responses. One common way to assess similarity are spike train distances. These can be div…