Revisiting Reset Mechanisms in Spiking Neural Networks for Sequential Modeling: Specialized Discretization for Binary Activated RNN

Abstract

In the field of image recognition, spiking neural networks (SNNs) have achieved performance comparable to conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs). In such applications, SNNs essentially function as traditional neural networks with quantized activation values. This article focuses on an another alternative perspective,viewing SNNs as binary-activated recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for sequential modeling tasks. From this viewpoint, current SNN architectures face several fundamental challenges in sequence modeling: (1) Traditional models lack effective memory mechanisms for long-range sequence modeling; (2) The biological-inspired components in SNNs (such as reset mechanisms and refractory period applications) remain theoretically under-explored for sequence tasks; (3) The RNN-like computational paradigm in SNNs prevents parallel training across different timesteps. To address these challenges, this study conducts a systematic analysis of the fundamental mechanisms underlying reset operations and refractory periods in binary-activated RNN-based SNN sequence models. We re-examine whether such biological mechanisms are strictly necessary for generating sparse spiking patterns, provide new theoretical explanations and insights, and ultimately propose the fixed-refractory-period SNN architecture for sequence modeling.