{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/hessian-aware-quantization-of-spiking-neural","title":"Hessian Aware Quantization of Spiking Neural Networks","arxiv_id":"2104.14117","date":"2021-04-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Hin Wai Lui","Emre Neftci"],"abstract":"To achieve the low latency, high throughput, and energy efficiency benefits of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), reducing the memory and compute requirements when running on a neuromorphic hardware is an important step. Neuromorphic architecture allows massively parallel computation with variable and local bit-precisions. However, how different bit-precisions should be allocated to different layers or connections of the network is not trivial. In this work, we demonstrate how a layer-wise Hessian trace analysis can measure the sensitivity of the loss to any perturbation of the layer's weights, and this can be used to guide the allocation of a layer-specific bit-precision when quantizing an SNN. In addition, current gradient based methods of SNN training use a complex neuron model with multiple state variables, which is not ideal for compute and memory efficiency. To address this challenge, we present a simplified neuron model that reduces the number of state variables by 4-fold while still being compatible with gradient based training. We find that the impact on model accuracy when using a layer-wise bit-precision correlated well with that layer's Hessian trace. The accuracy of the optimal quantized network only dropped by 0.2%, yet the network size was reduced by 58%. This reduces memory usage and allows fixed-point arithmetic with simpler digital circuits to be used, increasing the overall throughput and energy efficiency.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.14117v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.14117v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"hessian-aware-quantization-of-spiking-neural","repo_url":"https://github.com/luithw/decolle-quantization","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"GPL-3.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"quantization","task_name":"Quantization"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2104.14117","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2104.14117","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}