Training Deep Normalization-Free Spiking Neural Networks with Lateral Inhibition
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have garnered significant attention as a central paradigm in neuromorphic computing, owing to their energy efficiency and biological plausibility. However, training deep SNNs has critically depended on explicit normalization schemes, leading to a trade-off between performance and biological realism. To resolve this conflict, we propose a normalization-free learning framework that incorporates lateral inhibition inspired by cortical circuits. Our framework replaces the traditional feedforward SNN layer with distinct excitatory (E) and inhibitory (I) neuronal populations that capture the key features of the cortical E-I interaction. The E-I circuit dynamically regulates neuronal activity through subtractive and divisive inhibition, which respectively control the excitability and gain of neurons. To stabilize end-to-end training of the biologically constrained SNNs, we propose two key techniques: E-I Init and E-I Prop. E-I Init is a dynamic parameter initialization scheme that balances excitatory and inhibitory inputs while performing gain control. E-I Prop decouples the backpropagation of the circuit from the forward pass, regulating gradient flow. Experiments across multiple datasets and network architectures demonstrate that our framework enables stable training of deep normalization-free SNNs with biological realism, achieving competitive performance. Therefore, our work not only provides a solution to training deep SNNs but also serves as a computational platform for further exploring the functions of E-I interaction in large-scale cortical computation. Code is available at https://github.com/vwOvOwv/DeepEISNN.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
SpiLiFormer: Enhancing Spiking Transformers with Lateral Inhibition
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) based on Transformers have garnered significant attention due to their superior performance and high energy efficiency. However, the spiking attention modules of most existing Transformer-b…
NeuronSpark: A Spiking Neural Network Language Model with Selective State Space Dynamics
We ask whether a pure spiking backbone can learn large-scale language modeling from random initialization, without Transformer distillation. We introduce NeuronSpark, a 0.9B-parameter SNN language model trained with next…
Closing the Theory-Practice Gap in Spiking Transformers via Effective Dimension
Spiking transformers achieve competitive accuracy with conventional transformers while offering $38$-$57\times$ energy efficiency on neuromorphic hardware, yet no theoretical framework guides their design. This paper est…
Bio-inspired learnable divisive normalization for ANNs
In this work we introduce DivNormEI, a novel bio-inspired convolutional network that performs divisive normalization, a canonical cortical computation, along with lateral inhibition and excitation that is tailored for in…
Decoderimage-classificationImage ClassificationObject RecognitionEmergence of robust looming selectivity via coordinated inhibitory neural computations
In the locust's lobula giant movement detector neural pathways, four categories of inhibition, i.e., global inhibition, self-inhibition, lateral inhibition, and feed-forward inhibition, have been functionally explored in…