ANN-to-SNN conversion has emerged as a key approach to train Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), particularly for Transformer architectures, as it maps pre-trained ANN parameters to SNN equivalents without requiring retraining, thereby preserving ANN accuracy while eliminating training costs. Among various coding methods used in ANN-to-SNN conversion, time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding, which allows each neuron to at most one spike, offers significantly lower energy consumption. However, while previous TTFS-based SNNs have achieved comparable performance with convolutional ANNs, the attention mechanism and nonlinear layers in Transformer architectures remains a challenge by existing SNNs with TTFS coding. This paper proposes a new neuron structure for TTFS coding that expands its representational range and enhances the capability to process nonlinear functions, along with detailed designs of nonlinear neurons for different layers in Transformer. Experimental results on different models demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve high accuracy with significantly lower energy consumption. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to focus on converting Transformer to SNN with TTFS coding.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer low-latency and energy-efficient decision making on neuromorphic hardware, making them attractive for Reinforcement Learning (RL) in resource-constrained edge devices. However, most RL algorithms for continuous control are designed for Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), particularly the target network soft update mechanism, which conflicts with the discrete and non-differentiable dynamics of spiking neurons. We show that this mismatch destabilizes SNN training and degrades performance. To bridge the gap between discrete SNNs and continuous-control algorithms, we propose a novel proxy target framework. The proxy network introduces continuous and differentiable dynamics that enable smooth target updates, stabilizing the learning process. Since the proxy operates only during training, the deployed SNN remains fully energy-efficient with no additional inference overhead. Extensive experiments on continuous control benchmarks demonstrate that our framework consistently improves stability and achieves up to $32$% higher performance across various spiking neuron models. Notably, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach that enables SNNs with simple Leaky Integrate and Fire (LIF) neurons to surpass their ANN counterparts in continuous control. This work highlights the importance of SNN-tailored RL algorithms and paves the way for neuromorphic agents that combine high performance with low power consumption. Code is available at https://github.com/xuzijie32/Proxy-Target.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) exhibit significant advantages in terms of information encoding, computational capabilities, and power usage. We regard initializing weight distribution as a key problem for effective SNN training. When backpropagation (BP) through time is used in the initial training phase, it has a significant impact on gradient generation. We first derive an asymptotic formula for the response curve of spiking neurons, which approximates the real neuron response distribution. To avoid gradient vanishing, we then provide an initialization technique based on the slant asymptote. Finally, validations on classification tasks on the MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets demonstrate that our strategy can significantly speed up training and improve the model accuracy compared with other initialization methods. Further testing on various neuron configurations and training hyperparameters demonstrates comparable versatility and superiority to other methods. Based on the analyses, some recommendations for SNN training are made.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have garnered interest due to their energy efficiency and superior effectiveness on neuromorphic chips compared with traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs). One of the mainstream approaches to implementing deep SNNs is the ANN-SNN conversion, which integrates the efficient training strategy of ANNs with the energy-saving potential and fast inference capability of SNNs. However, under extremely low-latency conditions, the existing conversion theory suggests that the problem of SNNs' neurons firing more or fewer spikes within each layer, i.e., residual error, leads to a performance gap in the converted SNNs compared with the original ANNs. This severely limits the possibility of the practical application of SNNs on delay-sensitive edge devices. Existing conversion methods addressing this problem usually involve modifying the state of the conversion spiking neurons. However, these methods do not consider their adaptability and compatibility with neuromorphic chips. We propose a new approach based on explicit modeling of residual errors as additive noise. The noise is incorporated into the activation function of the source ANN, effectively reducing the impact of residual error on SNN performance. Our experiments on the CIFAR10/100 and Tiny-ImageNet datasets verify that our approach exceeds the prevailing ANN-SNN conversion methods and directly trained SNNs concerning accuracy and the required time steps. Overall, our method provides new ideas for improving SNN performance under ultralow-latency conditions and is expected to promote practical neuromorphic hardware applications for further development. The code for our NQ framework is available at https://github.com/hzp2022/ANN2SNN_NQ.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) exploit neural spikes to provide solutions for low-power intelligent applications on neuromorphic hardware. Although SNNs have high computational efficiency due to spiking communication, they still lack resistance to adversarial attacks and noise perturbations. In the brain, neuronal responses generally possess stochasticity induced by ion channels and synapses, while the role of stochasticity in computing tasks is poorly understood. Inspired by this, we elaborate a stochastic gating spiking neural model for layer-by-layer spike communication, introducing stochasticity to SNNs. Through theoretical analysis, our gating model can be viewed as a regularizer that prevents error amplification under attacks. Meanwhile, our work can explain the robustness of Poisson coding. Experimental results prove that our method can be used alone or with existing robust enhancement algorithms to improve SNN robustness and reduce SNN energy consumption. We hope our work will shed new light on the role of stochasticity in the computation of SNNs. Our code is available at https://github.com/DingJianhao/StoG-meets-SNN/.

The task of No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) is to estimate the quality score of an input image without additional information. NR-IQA models play a crucial role in the media industry, aiding in performance evaluation and optimization guidance. However, these models are found to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which introduce imperceptible perturbations to input images, re-sulting in significant changes in predicted scores. In this paper, we propose a defense method to improve the stability in predicted scores when attacked by small perturbations, thus enhancing the adversarial robustness of NR-IQA models. To be specific, we present theoretical evidence showing that the magnitude of score changes is related to the g 1 norm of the model's gradient with respect to the input image. Building upon this theoretical foundation, we propose a norm regularization training strategy aimed at reducing the g 1 norm of the gradient, thereby boosting the robustness of NR-IQA models. Experiments conducted on four NR-IQA baseline models demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy in reducing score changes in the presence of adversarial attacks. To the best of our knowledge, this work marks the first attempt to defend against adversarial attacks on NR-IQA models. Our study offers valuable insights into the adversarial robustness of NR-IQA models and provides a foundation for future research in this area.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as energy-efficient alternatives to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) when deployed on neuromorphic chips. While recent studies have demonstrated the impressive performance of deep SNNs on challenging tasks, their energy efficiency advantage has been diminished. Existing methods targeting energy consumption reduction do not fully exploit sparsity, whereas powerful pruning methods can achieve high sparsity but are not directly targeted at energy efficiency, limiting their effectiveness in energy saving. Furthermore, none of these works fully exploit the sparsity of neurons or the potential for unstructured neuron pruning in SNNs. In this paper, we propose a novel pruning framework that combines unstructured weight pruning with unstructured neuron pruning to maximize the utilization of the sparsity of neuromorphic computing, thereby enhancing energy efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of unstructured neuron pruning to deep SNNs. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves impressive energy efficiency gains. The sparse network pruned by our method with only 0.63\% remaining connections can achieve a remarkable 91 times increase in energy efficiency compared to the original dense network, requiring only 8.5M SOPs for inference, with merely 2.19\% accuracy loss on the CIFAR-10 dataset. Our work suggests that deep and dense SNNs exhibit high redundancy in energy consumption, highlighting the potential for targeted SNN sparsification to save energy.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs), attributed to the binary, event-driven nature of spikes, possess heightened biological plausibility and enhanced energy efficiency on neuromorphic hardware compared to analog neural networks (ANNs). Mainstream SNN training schemes apply backpropagation-through-time (BPTT) with surrogate gradients to replace the non-differentiable spike emitting process during backpropagation. While achieving competitive performance, the requirement for storing intermediate information at all time-steps incurs higher memory consumption and fails to fulfill the online property crucial to biological brains. Our work focuses on online training techniques, aiming for memory efficiency while preserving biological plausibility. The limitation of not having access to future information in early time steps in online training has constrained previous efforts to incorporate advantageous modules such as batch normalization. To address this problem, we propose Online Spiking Renormalization (OSR) to ensure consistent parameters between testing and training, and Online Threshold Stabilizer (OTS) to stabilize neuron firing rates across time steps. Furthermore, we design a novel online approach to compute the sample mean and variance over time for OSR. Experiments conducted on various datasets demonstrate the proposed method's superior performance among SNN online training algorithms. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhuyaoyu/SNN-online-normalization.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are gaining popularity in deep learning due to their low energy budget on neuromorphic hardware. However, they still face challenges in lacking sufficient robustness to guard safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. Many studies have been conducted to defend SNNs from the threat of adversarial attacks. This paper aims to uncover the robustness of SNN through the lens of the stability of nonlinear systems. We are inspired by the fact that searching for parameters altering the leaky integrate-and-fire dynamics can enhance their robustness. Thus, we dive into the dynamics of membrane potential perturbation and simplify the formulation of the dynamics. We present that membrane potential perturbation dynamics can reliably convey the intensity of perturbation. Our theoretical analyses imply that the simplified perturbation dynamics satisfy input-output stability. Thus, we propose a training framework with modified SNN neurons and to reduce the mean square of membrane potential perturbation aiming at enhancing the robustness of SNN. Finally, we experimentally verify the effectiveness of the framework in the setting of Gaussian noise training and adversarial training on the image classification task. Please refer to https://github.com/DingJianhao/stable-snn for our code implementation.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have attracted great attention for their energy-efficient operations and biologically inspired structures, offering potential advantages over Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in terms of energy efficiency and interpretability. Nonetheless, similar to ANNs, the robustness of SNNs remains a challenge, especially when facing adversarial attacks. Existing techniques, whether adapted from ANNs or specifically designed for SNNs, exhibit limitations in training SNNs or defending against strong attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to enhance the robustness of SNNs through gradient sparsity regularization. We observe that SNNs exhibit greater resilience to random perturbations compared to adversarial perturbations, even at larger scales. Motivated by this, we aim to narrow the gap between SNNs under adversarial and random perturbations, thereby improving their overall robustness. To achieve this, we theoretically prove that this performance gap is upper bounded by the gradient sparsity of the probability associated with the true label concerning the input image, laying the groundwork for a practical strategy to train robust SNNs by regularizing the gradient sparsity. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments on both image-based and event-based datasets. The results demonstrate notable improvements in the robustness of SNNs. Our work highlights the importance of gradient sparsity in SNNs and its role in enhancing robustness.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) show great potential due to their energy efficiency, fast processing capabilities, and robustness. There are two main approaches to constructing SNNs. Direct training methods require much memory, while conversion methods offer a simpler and more efficient option. However, current conversion methods mainly focus on converting convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to SNNs. Converting Transformers to SNN is challenging because of the presence of non-linear modules. In this paper, we propose an Expectation Compensation Module to preserve the accuracy of the conversion. The core idea is to use information from the previous T time-steps to calculate the expected output at time-step T. We also propose a Multi-Threshold Neuron and the corresponding Parallel Parameter normalization to address the challenge of large time steps needed for high accuracy, aiming to reduce network latency and power consumption. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. For example, we achieve a top-1 accuracy of 88.60% with only a 1% loss in accuracy using 4 time steps while consuming only 35% of the original power of the Transformer. To our knowledge, this is the first successful Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to SNN conversion for Spiking Transformers that achieves high accuracy, low latency, and low power consumption on complex datasets. The source codes of the proposed method are available at https://github.com/h-z-h-cell/Transformer-to-SNN-ECMT.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have garnered significant attention for their low power consumption and high biological interpretability. Their rich spatio-temporal information processing capability and event-driven nature make them ideally well-suited for neuromorphic datasets. However, current SNNs struggle to balance accuracy and latency in classifying these datasets. In this paper, we propose Hybrid Step-wise Distillation (HSD) method, tailored for neuromorphic datasets, to mitigate the notable decline in performance at lower time steps. Our work disentangles the dependency between the number of event frames and the time steps of SNNs, utilizing more event frames during the training stage to improve performance, while using fewer event frames during the inference stage to reduce latency. Nevertheless, the average output of SNNs across all time steps is susceptible to individual time step with abnormal outputs, particularly at extremely low time steps. To tackle this issue, we implement Step-wise Knowledge Distillation (SKD) module that considers variations in the output distribution of SNNs at each time step. Empirical evidence demonstrates that our method yields competitive performance in classification tasks on neuromorphic datasets, especially at lower time steps. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/hsw0929/HSD.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have received extensive academic attention due to the unique properties of low power consumption and high-speed computing on neuromorphic chips. Among various training methods of SNNs, ANN-SNN conversion has shown the equivalent level of performance as ANNs on large-scale datasets. However, unevenness error, which refers to the deviation caused by different temporal sequences of spike arrival on activation layers, has not been effectively resolved and seriously suffers the performance of SNNs under the condition of short time-steps. In this paper, we make a detailed analysis of unevenness error and divide it into four categories. We point out that the case of the ANN output being zero while the SNN output being larger than zero accounts for the largest percentage. Based on this, we theoretically prove the sufficient and necessary conditions of this case and propose an optimization strategy based on residual membrane potential to reduce unevenness error. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets. For example, we reach top-1 accuracy of 64.32% on ImageNet with 10-steps. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time ANN-SNN conversion can simultaneously achieve high accuracy and ultra-low-latency on the complex dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/hzc1208/ANN2SNN_SRP.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have attracted significant attention due to their energy-efficient properties and potential application on neuromorphic hardware. State-of-the-art SNNs are typically composed of simple Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neurons and have become comparable to ANNs in image classification tasks on large-scale datasets. However, the robustness of these deep SNNs has not yet been fully uncovered. In this paper, we first experimentally observe that layers in these SNNs mostly communicate by rate coding. Based on this rate coding property, we develop a novel rate coding SNN-specified attack method, Rate Gradient Approximation Attack (RGA). We generalize the RGA attack to SNNs composed of LIF neurons with different leaky parameters and input encoding by designing surrogate gradients. In addition, we develop the time-extended enhancement to generate more effective adversarial examples. The experiment results indicate that our proposed RGA attack is more effective than the previous attack and is less sensitive to neuron hyperparameters. We also conclude from the experiment that rate-coded SNN composed of LIF neurons is not secure, which calls for exploring training methods for SNNs composed of complex neurons and other neuronal codings. Code is available at https://github.com/putshua/SNN_attack_RGA

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been attached great importance due to the distinctive properties of low power consumption, biological plausibility, and adversarial robustness. The most effective way to train deep SNNs is through ANN-to-SNN conversion, which have yielded the best performance in deep network structure and large-scale datasets. However, there is a trade-off between accuracy and latency. In order to achieve high precision as original ANNs, a long simulation time is needed to match the firing rate of a spiking neuron with the activation value of an analog neuron, which impedes the practical application of SNN. In this paper, we aim to achieve high-performance converted SNNs with extremely low latency (fewer than 32 time-steps). We start by theoretically analyzing ANN-to-SNN conversion and show that scaling the thresholds does play a similar role as weight normalization. Instead of introducing constraints that facilitate ANN-to-SNN conversion at the cost of model capacity, we applied a more direct way by optimizing the initial membrane potential to reduce the conversion loss in each layer. Besides, we demonstrate that optimal initialization of membrane potentials can implement expected error-free ANN-to-SNN conversion. We evaluate our algorithm on the CIFAR-10 dataset and CIFAR-100 dataset and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, using fewer time-steps. For example, we reach top-1 accuracy of 93.38% on CIFAR-10 with 16 time-steps. Moreover, our method can be applied to other ANN-SNN conversion methodologies and remarkably promote performance when the time-steps is small.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising to be widely deployed in real-time and safety-critical applications with the advance of neuromorphic computing. Recent work has demonstrated the insensitivity of SNNs to small random perturbations due to the discrete internal information representation. The variety of training algorithms and the involvement of the temporal dimension pose more threats to the robustness of SNNs than that of typical neural networks. We account for the vulnerability of SNNs by constructing adversaries based on different differentiable approximation techniques. By deriving a Lipschitz constant specifically for the spike representation, we first theoretically answer the question of how much adversarial invulnerability is retained in SNNs. Hence, to defend against the broad attack methods, we propose a regularized adversarial training scheme with low computational overheads. SNNs can benefit from the constraint of the perturbed spike distance's amplification and the generalization on multiple adversarial $\epsilon$-neighbourhoods. Our experiments on the image recognition benchmarks have proven that our training scheme can defend against powerful adversarial attacks crafted from strong differentiable approximations. To be specific, our approach makes the black-box attacks of the Projected Gradient Descent attack nearly ineffective. We believe that our work will facilitate the spread of SNNs for safety-critical applications and help understand the robustness of the human brain.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are promising in neuromorphic hardware owing to utilizing spatio-temporal information and sparse event-driven signal processing. However, it is challenging to train SNNs due to the non-differentiable nature of the binary firing function. The surrogate gradients alleviate the training problem and make SNNs obtain comparable performance as Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) with the same structure. Unfortunately, batch normalization, contributing to the success of ANNs, does not play a prominent role in SNNs because of the additional temporal dimension. To this end, we propose an effective normalization method called temporal effective batch normalization (TEBN). By rescaling the presynaptic inputs with different weights at every time-step, temporal distributions become smoother and uniform. Theoretical analysis shows that TEBN can be viewed as a smoother of SNN's optimization landscape and could help stabilize the gradient norm. Experimental results on both static and neuromorphic datasets show that SNNs with TEBN outperform the state-of-the-art accuracy with fewer time-steps, and achieve better robustness to hyper-parameters than other normalizations.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), as bio-inspired energy-efficient neural networks, have attracted great attentions from researchers and industry. The most efficient way to train deep SNNs is through ANN-SNN conversion. However, the conversion usually suffers from accuracy loss and long inference time, which impede the practical application of SNN. In this paper, we theoretically analyze ANN-SNN conversion and derive sufficient conditions of the optimal conversion. To better correlate ANN-SNN and get greater accuracy, we propose Rate Norm Layer to replace the ReLU activation function in source ANN training, enabling direct conversion from a trained ANN to an SNN. Moreover, we propose an optimal fit curve to quantify the fit between the activation value of source ANN and the actual firing rate of target SNN. We show that the inference time can be reduced by optimizing the upper bound of the fit curve in the revised ANN to achieve fast inference. Our theory can explain the existing work on fast reasoning and get better results. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves near loss-less conversion with VGG-16, PreActResNet-18, and deeper structures. Moreover, it can reach 8.6× faster reasoning performance under 0.265× energy consumption of the typical method. The code is available at https://github.com/DingJianhao/OptSNNConvertion-RNL-RIL.

According to the latest ATSC3.0 standard, a broadcast gateway software implementation scheme using multi-thread network programming is devised. This scheme meets real-time processing demand of fundamental system capacity. In order to satisfy extension business demand of higher capacity and higher concurrency of future fusion network, a CPU-FPGA software-hardware co-design scheme is proposed in the consideration of data processing features of broadcast gateway. Based on the results of detailed data processing task analysis, the most time consuming and the highest CPU occupation ratio tasks are distributed to FPGA implementation. Data exchange and operation synchronization between software and hardware is realized through data sharing and memory mapping I/O. According to testing results, the time consumption of main modules and the overall CPU occupation ratio are reduced effectively. The data capacity of a broadcast gateway is greatly improved at the same time.