Papers › Enabling Deep Spiking Neural Networks with Hybrid Conversion and Spike Timing...

Enabling Deep Spiking Neural Networks with Hybrid Conversion and Spike Timing Dependent Backpropagation

4 May 2020ICLR 2020 1arXiv:2005.01807archive 2025-07-28

Nitin Rathi, Gopalakrishnan Srinivasan, Priyadarshini Panda, Kaushik Roy

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) operate with asynchronous discrete events (or spikes) which can potentially lead to higher energy-efficiency in neuromorphic hardware implementations. Many works have shown that an SNN for inference can be formed by copying the weights from a trained Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and setting the firing threshold for each layer as the maximum input received in that layer. These type of converted SNNs require a large number of time steps to achieve competitive accuracy which diminishes the energy savings. The number of time steps can be reduced by training SNNs with spike-based backpropagation from scratch, but that is computationally expensive and slow. To address these challenges, we present a computationally-efficient training technique for deep SNNs. We propose a hybrid training methodology: 1) take a converted SNN and use its weights and thresholds as an initialization step for spike-based backpropagation, and 2) perform incremental spike-timing dependent backpropagation (STDB) on this carefully initialized network to obtain an SNN that converges within few epochs and requires fewer time steps for input processing. STDB is performed with a novel surrogate gradient function defined using neuron's spike time. The proposed training methodology converges in less than 20 epochs of spike-based backpropagation for most standard image classification datasets, thereby greatly reducing the training complexity compared to training SNNs from scratch. We perform experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets for both VGG and ResNet architectures. We achieve top-1 accuracy of 65.19% for ImageNet dataset on SNN with 250 time steps, which is 10X faster compared to converted SNNs with similar accuracy.

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