Synaptic plasticity plays a critical role in the expression power of brain neural networks. Among diverse plasticity rules, synaptic scaling presents indispensable effects on homeostasis maintenance and synaptic strength regulation. In the current modeling of brain-inspired spiking neural networks (SNN), backpropagation through time is widely adopted because it can achieve high performance using a small number of time steps. Nevertheless, the synaptic scaling mechanism has not yet been well touched. In this work, we propose an experience-dependent adaptive synaptic scaling mechanism (AS-SNN) for spiking neural networks. The learning process has two stages: First, in the forward path, adaptive short-term potentiation or depression is triggered for each synapse according to afferent stimuli intensity accumulated by presynaptic historical neural activities. Second, in the backward path, long-term consolidation is executed through gradient signals regulated by the corresponding scaling factor. This mechanism shapes the pattern selectivity of synapses and the information transfer they mediate. We theoretically prove that the proposed adaptive synaptic scaling function follows a contraction map and finally converges to an expected fixed point, in accordance with state-of-the-art results in three tasks on perturbation resistance, continual learning, and graph learning. Specifically, for the perturbation resistance and continual learning tasks, our approach improves the accuracy on the N-MNIST benchmark over the baseline by 44% and 25%, respectively. An expected firing rate callback and sparse coding can be observed in graph learning. Extensive experiments on ablation study and cost evaluation evidence the effectiveness and efficiency of our nonparametric adaptive scaling method, which demonstrates the great potential of SNN in continual learning and robust learning.

The rapid development of deep learning has propelled many real-world artificial intelligence applications. Many of these applications integrate multiple neural networks (multi-NN) to cater to various functionalities. There are two challenges of multi-NN acceleration: (1) competition for shared resources becomes a bottleneck, and (2) heterogeneous workloads exhibit remarkably different computing-memory characteristics and various synchronization requirements. Therefore, resource isolation and fine-grained resource allocation for each task are two fundamental requirements for multi-NN computing systems. Although a number of multi-NN acceleration technologies have been explored, few can completely fulfill both of these requirements, especially for mobile scenarios. This paper reports a Hierarchical Asynchronous Parallel Model (HASP) to enhance multi-NN performance to meet both requirements. HASP can be implemented on a multicore processor that adopts Multiple Instruction Multiple Data (MIMD) or Single Instruction Multiple Thread (SIMT) architectures, with minor adaptive modification needed. Further, a prototype chip is developed to validate the hardware effectiveness of this design. A corresponding mapping strategy is also developed, allowing the proposed architecture to simultaneously promote resource utilization and throughput. With the same workload, the prototype chip demonstrates 3.62$\boldsymbol{\times}$, and 3.51$\boldsymbol{\times}$higher throughput over Planaria and 8.68$\boldsymbol{\times}$, 2.61$\boldsymbol{\times}$over Jetson AGX Orin for MobileNet-V1 and ResNet50, respectively.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs), an important family of neuroscience-oriented intelligent models, play an essential role in the neuromorphic computing community. Spike rate coding and temporal coding are the mainstream coding schemes in the current modeling of SNNs. However, rate coding usually suffers from limited representation resolution and long latency, while temporal coding usually suffers from under-utilization of spike activities. To this end, we propose spike attention coding (SAC) for SNNs. By introducing learnable attention coefficients for each time step, our coding scheme can naturally unify rate coding and temporal coding, and then flexibly learn optimal coefficients for better performance. Several normalization and regularization techniques are further incorporated to control the range and distribution of the learned attention coefficients. Extensive experiments on classification, generation, and regression tasks are conducted and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed coding scheme. This work provides a flexible coding scheme to enhance the representation power of SNNs and extends their application scope beyond the mainstream classification scenario.

Biological spiking neurons with intrinsic dynamics underlie the powerful representation and learning capabilities of the brain for processing multimodal information in complex environments. Despite recent tremendous progress in spiking neural networks (SNNs) for handling Euclidean-space tasks, it still remains challenging to exploit SNNs in processing non-Euclidean-space data represented by graph data, mainly due to the lack of effective modeling framework and useful training techniques. Here we present a general spike-based modeling framework that enables the direct training of SNNs for graph learning. Through spatial-temporal unfolding for spiking data flows of node features, we incorporate graph convolution filters into spiking dynamics and formalize a synergistic learning paradigm. Considering the unique features of spike representation and spiking dynamics, we propose a spatial-temporal feature normalization (STFN) technique suitable for SNN to accelerate convergence. We instantiate our methods into two spiking graph models, including graph convolution SNNs and graph attention SNNs, and validate their performance on three node-classification benchmarks, including Cora, Citeseer, and Pubmed. Our model can achieve comparable performance with the state-of-the-art graph neural network (GNN) models with much lower computation costs, demonstrating great benefits for the execution on neuromorphic hardware and prompting neuromorphic applications in graphical scenarios.

Crossbar architecture has been widely used in neural network (NN) accelerators, involving conventional and emerging devices. It performs well on the fully connected layer through efficient vector-matrix multiplication. Whereas, the advantages degrade on the convolutional layer with huge data reuse, since the execution speed and resource overhead are imbalanced when using existing fully unfolded or fully folded mapping strategy. To address this issue, we propose a novel semi-folded mapping (SemiMap) framework for implementing the convolution on crossbars. It simultaneously folds the physical resources along the row dimension of feature maps (FMs) and unfolds them along the column dimension. The former reduces the resource overhead, and the latter maintains the parallelism. An FM slicing scheme is further proposed to enable the processing of large-size image. Via our mapping framework, a row-by-row streaming pipeline for intraimage dataflow and periodical pipeline for interimage dataflow are easy to be obtained. To validate the idea, we build a many-crossbar architecture with several designs to guarantee the overall functionality and performance. Based on the measurement data of a fabricated chip, a mapping compiler and a cycle-accurate simulator are developed for the hardware simulation of large-scale networks. We evaluate the proposed SemiMap on various convolutional NNs across different network scale. ${>} 35 {\times }$ resource saving and several hundred times cycle reduction are demonstrated compared to the existing fully unfolded and fully folded strategies, respectively. This paper jumps out of the current extreme mapping schemes, and provides a balanced solution on how to efficiently deploy the computational graphs with data reuse on many-crossbar architecture.