Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are emerging as a promising alternative to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their inherent energy efficiency. Owing to the inherent sparsity in spike generation within SNNs, the in-depth analysis and optimization of intermediate output spikes are often neglected. This oversight significantly restricts the inherent energy efficiency of SNNs and diminishes their advantages in spatiotemporal feature extraction, resulting in a lack of accuracy and unnecessary energy expenditure. In this work, we analyze the inherent spiking characteristics of SNNs from both temporal and spatial perspectives. In terms of spatial analysis, we find that shallow layers tend to focus on learning vertical variations, while deeper layers gradually learn horizontal variations of features. Regarding temporal analysis, we observe that there is not a significant difference in feature learning across different time steps. This suggests that increasing the time steps has limited effect on feature learning. Based on the insights derived from these analyses, we propose a Frequency-based Spatial-Temporal Attention (FSTA) module to enhance feature learning in SNNs. This module aims to improve the feature learning capabilities by suppressing redundant spike features. The experimental results indicate that the introduction of the FSTA module significantly reduces the spike firing rate of SNNs, demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines across multiple datasets.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), inspired by the human brain, offer significant computational efficiency through discrete spike-based information transfer. Despite their potential to reduce inference energy consumption, a performance gap persists between SNNs and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), primarily due to current training methods and inherent model limitations. While recent research has aimed to enhance SNN learning by employing knowledge distillation (KD) from ANN teacher networks, traditional distillation techniques often overlook the distinctive spatiotemporal properties of SNNs, thus failing to fully leverage their advantages. To overcome these challenge, we propose a novel logit distillation method characterized by temporal separation and entropy regularization. This approach improves existing SNN distillation techniques by performing distillation learning on logits across different time steps, rather than merely on aggregated output features. Furthermore, the integration of entropy regularization stabilizes model optimization and further boosts the performance. Extensive experimental results indicate that our method surpasses prior SNN distillation strategies, whether based on logit distillation, feature distillation, or a combination of both. Our project is available at https://github.com/yukairong/TSER.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have gained significant attention due to their biological plausibility and energy efficiency, making them promising alternatives to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). However, the performance gap between SNNs and ANNs remains a substantial challenge hindering the widespread adoption of SNNs. In this paper, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Attention Aggregator SNN (STAA-SNN) framework, which dynamically focuses on and captures both spatial and temporal dependencies. First, we introduce a spike-driven self-attention mechanism specifically designed for SNNs. Additionally, we pioneeringly incorporate position encoding to integrate latent temporal relationships into the incoming features. For spatial-temporal information aggregation, we employ step attention to selectively amplify relevant features to variant steps. Finally, we implement a time-step random dropout strategy to avoid local optima. The framework demonstrates exceptional performance across diverse datasets and exhibits strong generalization capabilities. Notably, STAA-SNN achieves state-of-the-art results on neuromorphic datasets CIFAR10-DVS of 82.10% and with performances of 97.14%, 82.05% and 70.40% on the static datasets CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet, respectively. Furthermore, this model exhibits improved performance ranging from 0.33% to 2.80% with fewer time steps.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are valued for their ability to process spatio-temporal information efficiently, offering biological plausibility, low energy consumption, and compatibility with neuromorphic hardware. However, the commonly used Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) model overlooks neuron heterogeneity and independently processes spatial and temporal information, limiting the expressive power of SNNs. In this paper, we propose the Dual Adaptive Leaky Integrate- and-Fire (DA-LIF) model, which introduces spatial and temporal tuning with independently learnable decays. Evaluations on both static (CIFAR10/100, ImageNet) and neuromorphic datasets (CIFAR10-DVS, DVS128 Gesture) demonstrate superior accuracy with fewer timesteps compared to state-of-the-art methods. Importantly, DA-LIF achieves these improvements with minimal additional parameters, maintaining low energy consumption. Extensive ablation studies further highlight the robustness and effectiveness of the DA-LIF model.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are increasingly recognized for their biological plausibility and energy efficiency, positioning them as strong alternatives to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in neuromorphic computing applications. SNNs inherently process temporal information by leveraging the precise timing of spikes, but balancing temporal feature utilization with low energy consumption remains a challenge. In this work, we introduce Temporal Shift module for Spiking Neural Networks (TS-SNN), which incorporates a novel Temporal Shift (TS) module to integrate past, present, and future spike features within a single timestep via a simple yet effective shift operation. A residual combination method prevents information loss by integrating shifted and original features. The TS module is lightweight, requiring only one additional learnable parameter, and can be seamlessly integrated into existing architectures with minimal additional computational cost. TS-SNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks like CIFAR-10 (96.72%), CIFAR-100 (80.28%), and ImageNet (70.61%) with fewer timesteps, while maintaining low energy consumption. This work marks a significant step forward in developing efficient and accurate SNN architectures.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising approach for energy-efficient and biologically plausible computation. However, due to limitations in existing training methods and inherent model constraints, SNNs often exhibit a performance gap when compared to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Knowledge distillation (KD) has been explored as a technique to transfer knowledge from ANN teacher models to SNN student models to mitigate this gap. Traditional KD methods typically use Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to align output distributions. However, conventional KL-based approaches fail to fully exploit the unique characteristics of SNNs, as they tend to overemphasize high-probability predictions while neglecting low-probability ones, leading to suboptimal generalization. To address this, we propose Head-Tail Aware Kullback-Leibler (HTA-KL) divergence, a novel KD method for SNNs. HTA-KL introduces a cumulative probability-based mask to dynamically distinguish between high- and low-probability regions. It assigns adaptive weights to ensure balanced knowledge transfer, enhancing the overall performance. By integrating forward KL (FKL) and reverse KL (RKL) divergence, our method effectively align both head and tail regions of the distribution. We evaluate our methods on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Tiny ImageNet datasets. Our method outperforms existing methods on most datasets with fewer timesteps.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) exhibit exceptional energy efficiency on neuromorphic hardware due to their sparse activation patterns. However, conventional training methods based on surrogate gradients and Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) not only lag behind Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in performance, but also incur significant computational and memory overheads that grow linearly with the temporal dimension. To enable high-performance SNN training under limited computational resources, we propose an enhanced self-distillation framework, jointly optimized with rate-based backpropagation. Specifically, the firing rates of intermediate SNN layers are projected onto lightweight ANN branches, and high-quality knowledge generated by the model itself is used to optimize substructures through the ANN pathways. Unlike traditional self-distillation paradigms, we observe that low-quality self-generated knowledge may hinder convergence. To address this, we decouple the teacher signal into reliable and unreliable components, ensuring that only reliable knowledge is used to guide the optimization of the model. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, CIFAR10-DVS, and ImageNet demonstrate that our method reduces training complexity while achieving high-performance SNN training. Our code is available at https://github.com/Intelli-Chip-Lab/enhanced-self-distillation-framework-for-snn.