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Huihui Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Huihui Zhou.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

TerraceMoE: A Cost Model for Hierarchical MoE All-to-All Communication

Hierarchical two-hop dispatch can reduce slow-fabric traffic in expert-parallel Mixture-of-Experts training, but it adds a second collective and an arrival-side operator chain. We present a cost model for screening that trade at the communication-call level, bounded by validation gates that withdraw a capability in code when they fail rather than reporting a caveat. At a reference geometry with 16 groups of 8 ranks, $q=3$, $H=2048$, and 4096 tokens per rank, the corrected effective breakeven hierarchy ratio is 3.98 for the measured PyTorch arrival chain, 1.49 for a hypothetical fused target, and 1.10 at zero implementation overhead. These are ratio-only sensitivity results, not deployment predictions: platform A measures 1.03, platform B has no separated fast/slow measurement, and neither machine measured here reaches the hierarchical regime. Four communication-level corpora pass their gates; a drift probe and the step-level gate fail. The latter failure is enforced in code, so we make no training-throughput prediction. The enabling routing constraint fixes per-token fan-out and per-selected-group quota, while aggregate per-peer counts remain data-dependent. Its measured validation-loss cost is small but nonzero (+0.0034 nats); downstream equivalence is reported with incomplete estimator provenance and is therefore not independently reconstructible from the artifact. Code, calibration constants and the validation gates are at https://github.com/weich97/TerraceMoE-simulator.

cs.DC

FSD-VLN: Fast-Slow Dual-System Modeling for Aerial Long-Horizon Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables UAV autonomous navigation in unknown environments by mapping language instructions to real-time visual inputs. Compared with GPS-dependent or pre-programmed navigation, VLN supports intuitive human-machine interaction and stronger environmental adaptability, requiring tight integration of high-level semantic reasoning and low-latency flight control.Existing methods suffer from structural misalignment between global multimodal understanding and sequential action generation, causing jittery trajectories and severe decision latency for long-horizon aerial navigation. To solve this issue, we propose FSD-VLN, a fast-slow dual-system architecture disentangling semantic reasoning and low-latency flight command generation.The framework has two asynchronous branches: a slow stream extracting stable semantic priors from pre-trained vision-language models, and a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) fast stream modeling cross-temporal action distributions to produce consistent flight outputs. We further introduce a time-aware adaptive optimizer to stabilize long-sequence training and reduce gradient oscillation.Large-scale low-altitude simulation experiments show FSD-VLN achieves up to 2X higher navigation success rates on unseen scenes than SOTA methods, while cutting single-action inference delay and total task runtime by over 50%. Our work validates the benefit of decoupled semantic-control modeling and provides a practical paradigm for long-horizon aerial VLN.

cs.RO

Exploring Surround-View Fisheye Camera 3D Object Detection

In this work, we explore the technical feasibility of implementing end-to-end 3D object detection (3DOD) with surround-view fisheye camera system. Specifically, we first investigate the performance drop incurred when transferring classic pinhole-based 3D object detectors to fisheye imagery. To mitigate this, we then develop two methods that incorporate the unique geometry of fisheye images into mainstream detection frameworks: one based on the bird's-eye-view (BEV) paradigm, named FisheyeBEVDet, and the other on the query-based paradigm, named FisheyePETR. Both methods adopt spherical spatial representations to effectively capture fisheye geometry. In light of the lack of dedicated evaluation benchmarks, we release Fisheye3DOD, a new open dataset synthesized using CARLA and featuring both standard pinhole and fisheye camera arrays. Experiments on Fisheye3DOD show that our fisheye-compatible modeling improves accuracy by up to 6.2% over baseline methods.

cs.CV

A Self-Ensemble Inspired Approach for Effective Training of Binary-Weight Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are a promising approach to low-power applications on neuromorphic hardware due to their energy efficiency. However, training SNNs is challenging because of the non-differentiable spike generation function. To address this issue, the commonly used approach is to adopt the backpropagation through time framework, while assigning the gradient of the non-differentiable function with some surrogates. Similarly, Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) also face the non-differentiability problem and rely on approximating gradients. However, the deep relationship between these two fields and how their training techniques can benefit each other has not been systematically researched. Furthermore, training binary-weight SNNs is even more difficult. In this work, we present a novel perspective on the dynamics of SNNs and their close connection to BNNs through an analysis of the backpropagation process. We demonstrate that training a feedforward SNN can be viewed as training a self-ensemble of a binary-activation neural network with noise injection. Drawing from this new understanding of SNN dynamics, we introduce the Self-Ensemble Inspired training method for (Binary-Weight) SNNs (SEI-BWSNN), which achieves high-performance results with low latency even for the case of the 1-bit weights. Specifically, we leverage a structure of multiple shortcuts and a knowledge distillation-based training technique to improve the training of (binary-weight) SNNs. Notably, by binarizing FFN layers in a Transformer architecture, our approach achieves 82.52% accuracy on ImageNet with only 2 time steps, indicating the effectiveness of our methodology and the potential of binary-weight SNNs.

cs.NE

Energy-Oriented Computing Architecture Simulator for SNN Training

With the growing demand for intelligent computing, neuromorphic computing, a paradigm that mimics the structure and functionality of the human brain, offers a promising approach to developing new high-efficiency intelligent computing systems. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), the foundation of neuromorphic computing, have garnered significant attention due to their unique potential in energy efficiency and biomimetic neural processing. However, current hardware development for efficient SNN training lags significantly. No systematic energy evaluation methods exist for SNN training tasks. Therefore, this paper proposes an Energy-Oriented Computing Architecture Simulator (EOCAS) for SNN training to identify the optimal architecture. EOCAS investigates the high sparsity of spike signals, unique hardware design representations, energy assessment, and computation patterns to support energy optimization in various architectures. Under the guidance of EOCAS, we implement the power-aimed optimal hardware architecture through Verilog HDL and achieve low energy consumption using Synopsys Design Compiler with TSMC-28nm technology library under typical parameters. Compared with several State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) DNN and SNN works, our hardware architecture outstands others in various criteria.

cs.AR

Multiplication-Free Parallelizable Spiking Neurons with Efficient Spatio-Temporal Dynamics

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are distinguished from Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for their complex neuronal dynamics and sparse binary activations (spikes) inspired by the biological neural system. Traditional neuron models use iterative step-by-step dynamics, resulting in serial computation and slow training speed of SNNs. Recently, parallelizable spiking neuron models have been proposed to fully utilize the massive parallel computing ability of graphics processing units to accelerate the training of SNNs. However, existing parallelizable spiking neuron models involve dense floating operations and can only achieve high long-term dependencies learning ability with a large order at the cost of huge computational and memory costs. To solve the dilemma of performance and costs, we propose the mul-free channel-wise Parallel Spiking Neuron, which is hardware-friendly and suitable for SNNs' resource-restricted application scenarios. The proposed neuron imports the channel-wise convolution to enhance the learning ability, induces the sawtooth dilations to reduce the neuron order, and employs the bit-shift operation to avoid multiplications. The algorithm for the design and implementation of acceleration methods is discussed extensively. Our methods are validated in neuromorphic Spiking Heidelberg Digits voices, sequential CIFAR images, and neuromorphic DVS-Lip vision datasets, achieving superior performance over SOTA spiking neurons. Training speed results demonstrate the effectiveness of our acceleration methods, providing a practical reference for future research. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/PengXue0812/Multiplication-Free-Parallelizable-Spiking-Neurons-with-Efficient-Spatio-Temporal-Dynamics}{Github}.

cs.NE

High-speed and High-quality Vision Reconstruction of Spike Camera with Spike Stability Theorem

Neuromorphic vision sensors, such as the dynamic vision sensor (DVS) and spike camera, have gained increasing attention in recent years. The spike camera can detect fine textures by mimicking the fovea in the human visual system, and output a high-frequency spike stream. Real-time high-quality vision reconstruction from the spike stream can build a bridge to high-level vision task applications of the spike camera. To realize high-speed and high-quality vision reconstruction of the spike camera, we propose a new spike stability theorem that reveals the relationship between spike stream characteristics and stable light intensity. Based on the spike stability theorem, two parameter-free algorithms are designed for the real-time vision reconstruction of the spike camera. To demonstrate the performances of our algorithms, two datasets (a public dataset PKU-Spike-High-Speed and a newly constructed dataset SpikeCityPCL) are used to compare the reconstruction quality and speed of various reconstruction methods. Experimental results show that, compared with the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) reconstruction methods, our reconstruction methods obtain the best tradeoff between the reconstruction quality and speed. Additionally, we design the FPGA implementation method of our algorithms to realize the real-time (running at 20,000 FPS) visual reconstruction. Our work provides new theorem and algorithm foundations for the real-time edge-end vision processing of the spike camera.

cs.CV

Core Placement Optimization of Many-core Brain-Inspired Near-Storage Systems for Spiking Neural Network Training

With the increasing application scope of spiking neural networks (SNN), the complexity of SNN models has surged, leading to an exponential growth in demand for AI computility. As the new generation computing architecture of the neural networks, the efficiency and power consumption of distributed storage and parallel computing in the many-core near-memory computing system have attracted much attention. Among them, the mapping problem from logical cores to physical cores is one of the research hotspots. In order to improve the computing parallelism and system throughput of the many-core near-memory computing system, and to reduce power consumption, we propose a SNN training many-core deployment optimization method based on Off-policy Deterministic Actor-Critic. We utilize deep reinforcement learning as a nonlinear optimizer, treating the many-core topology as network graph features and using graph convolution to input the many-core structure into the policy network. We update the parameters of the policy network through near-end policy optimization to achieve deployment optimization of SNN models in the many-core near-memory computing architecture to reduce chip power consumption. To handle large-dimensional action spaces, we use continuous values matching the number of cores as the output of the policy network and then discretize them again to obtain new deployment schemes. Furthermore, to further balance inter-core computation latency and improve system throughput, we propose a model partitioning method with a balanced storage and computation strategy. Our method overcomes the problems such as uneven computation and storage loads between cores, and the formation of local communication hotspots, significantly reducing model training time, communication costs, and average flow load between cores in the many-core near-memory computing architecture.

cs.AR

A High Energy-Efficiency Multi-core Neuromorphic Architecture for Deep SNN Training

There is a growing necessity for edge training to adapt to dynamically changing environment. Neuromorphic computing represents a significant pathway for high-efficiency intelligent computation in energy-constrained edges, but existing neuromorphic architectures lack the ability of directly training spiking neural networks (SNNs) based on backpropagation. We develop a multi-core neuromorphic architecture with Feedforward-Propagation, Back-Propagation, and Weight-Gradient engines in each core, supporting high efficient parallel computing at both the engine and core levels. It combines various data flows and sparse computation optimization by fully leveraging the sparsity in SNN training, obtaining a high energy efficiency of 1.05TFLOPS/W@ FP16 @ 28nm, 55 ~ 85% reduction of DRAM access compared to A100 GPU in SNN trainings, and a 20-core deep SNN training and a 5-worker federated learning on FPGAs. Our study develops the first multi-core neuromorphic architecture supporting the direct SNN training, facilitating the neuromorphic computing in edge-learnable applications.

cs.AR

Real-time Stereo-based 3D Object Detection for Streaming Perception

The ability to promptly respond to environmental changes is crucial for the perception system of autonomous driving. Recently, a new task called streaming perception was proposed. It jointly evaluate the latency and accuracy into a single metric for video online perception. In this work, we introduce StreamDSGN, the first real-time stereo-based 3D object detection framework designed for streaming perception. StreamDSGN is an end-to-end framework that directly predicts the 3D properties of objects in the next moment by leveraging historical information, thereby alleviating the accuracy degradation of streaming perception. Further, StreamDSGN applies three strategies to enhance the perception accuracy: (1) A feature-flow-based fusion method, which generates a pseudo-next feature at the current moment to address the misalignment issue between feature and ground truth. (2) An extra regression loss for explicit supervision of object motion consistency in consecutive frames. (3) A large kernel backbone with a large receptive field for effectively capturing long-range spatial contextual features caused by changes in object positions. Experiments on the KITTI Tracking dataset show that, compared with the strong baseline, StreamDSGN significantly improves the streaming average precision by up to 4.33%. Our code is available at https://github.com/weiyangdaren/streamDSGN-pytorch.

cs.CV

Time-Evolving Dynamical System for Learning Latent Representations of Mouse Visual Neural Activity

Seeking high-quality representations with latent variable models (LVMs) to reveal the intrinsic correlation between neural activity and behavior or sensory stimuli has attracted much interest. In the study of the biological visual system, naturalistic visual stimuli are inherently high-dimensional and time-dependent, leading to intricate dynamics within visual neural activity. However, most work on LVMs has not explicitly considered neural temporal relationships. To cope with such conditions, we propose Time-Evolving Visual Dynamical System (TE-ViDS), a sequential LVM that decomposes neural activity into low-dimensional latent representations that evolve over time. To better align the model with the characteristics of visual neural activity, we split latent representations into two parts and apply contrastive learning to shape them. Extensive experiments on synthetic datasets and real neural datasets from the mouse visual cortex demonstrate that TE-ViDS achieves the best decoding performance on naturalistic scenes/movies, extracts interpretable latent trajectories that uncover clear underlying neural dynamics, and provides new insights into differences in visual information processing between subjects and between cortical regions. In summary, TE-ViDS is markedly competent in extracting stimulus-relevant embeddings from visual neural activity and contributes to the understanding of visual processing mechanisms. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Grasshlw/Time-Evolving-Visual-Dynamical-System.

cs.NE

Direct Training High-Performance Deep Spiking Neural Networks: A Review of Theories and Methods

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising energy-efficient alternative to artificial neural networks (ANNs), in virtue of their high biological plausibility, rich spatial-temporal dynamics, and event-driven computation. The direct training algorithms based on the surrogate gradient method provide sufficient flexibility to design novel SNN architectures and explore the spatial-temporal dynamics of SNNs. According to previous studies, the performance of models is highly dependent on their sizes. Recently, direct training deep SNNs have achieved great progress on both neuromorphic datasets and large-scale static datasets. Notably, transformer-based SNNs show comparable performance with their ANN counterparts. In this paper, we provide a new perspective to summarize the theories and methods for training deep SNNs with high performance in a systematic and comprehensive way, including theory fundamentals, spiking neuron models, advanced SNN models and residual architectures, software frameworks and neuromorphic hardware, applications, and future trends. The reviewed papers are collected at https://github.com/zhouchenlin2096/Awesome-Spiking-Neural-Networks

cs.NE

SVFormer: A Direct Training Spiking Transformer for Efficient Video Action Recognition

Video action recognition (VAR) plays crucial roles in various domains such as surveillance, healthcare, and industrial automation, making it highly significant for the society. Consequently, it has long been a research spot in the computer vision field. As artificial neural networks (ANNs) are flourishing, convolution neural networks (CNNs), including 2D-CNNs and 3D-CNNs, as well as variants of the vision transformer (ViT), have shown impressive performance on VAR. However, they usually demand huge computational cost due to the large data volume and heavy information redundancy introduced by the temporal dimension. To address this challenge, some researchers have turned to brain-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs), such as recurrent SNNs and ANN-converted SNNs, leveraging their inherent temporal dynamics and energy efficiency. Yet, current SNNs for VAR also encounter limitations, such as nontrivial input preprocessing, intricate network construction/training, and the need for repetitive processing of the same video clip, hindering their practical deployment. In this study, we innovatively propose the directly trained SVFormer (Spiking Video transFormer) for VAR. SVFormer integrates local feature extraction, global self-attention, and the intrinsic dynamics, sparsity, and spike-driven nature of SNNs, to efficiently and effectively extract spatio-temporal features. We evaluate SVFormer on two RGB datasets (UCF101, NTU-RGBD60) and one neuromorphic dataset (DVS128-Gesture), demonstrating comparable performance to the mainstream models in a more efficient way. Notably, SVFormer achieves a top-1 accuracy of 84.03% with ultra-low power consumption (21 mJ/video) on UCF101, which is state-of-the-art among directly trained deep SNNs, showcasing significant advantages over prior models.

cs.CV

QKFormer: Hierarchical Spiking Transformer using Q-K Attention

Spiking Transformers, which integrate Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) with Transformer architectures, have attracted significant attention due to their potential for energy efficiency and high performance. However, existing models in this domain still suffer from suboptimal performance. We introduce several innovations to improve the performance: i) We propose a novel spike-form Q-K attention mechanism, tailored for SNNs, which efficiently models the importance of token or channel dimensions through binary vectors with linear complexity. ii) We incorporate the hierarchical structure, which significantly benefits the performance of both the brain and artificial neural networks, into spiking transformers to obtain multi-scale spiking representation. iii) We design a versatile and powerful patch embedding module with a deformed shortcut specifically for spiking transformers. Together, we develop QKFormer, a hierarchical spiking transformer based on Q-K attention with direct training. QKFormer shows significantly superior performance over existing state-of-the-art SNN models on various mainstream datasets. Notably, with comparable size to Spikformer (66.34 M, 74.81%), QKFormer (64.96 M) achieves a groundbreaking top-1 accuracy of 85.65% on ImageNet-1k, substantially outperforming Spikformer by 10.84%. To our best knowledge, this is the first time that directly training SNNs have exceeded 85% accuracy on ImageNet-1K. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/zhouchenlin2096/QKFormer

cs.NE

SpikingJelly: An open-source machine learning infrastructure platform for spike-based intelligence

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) aim to realize brain-inspired intelligence on neuromorphic chips with high energy efficiency by introducing neural dynamics and spike properties. As the emerging spiking deep learning paradigm attracts increasing interest, traditional programming frameworks cannot meet the demands of the automatic differentiation, parallel computation acceleration, and high integration of processing neuromorphic datasets and deployment. In this work, we present the SpikingJelly framework to address the aforementioned dilemma. We contribute a full-stack toolkit for pre-processing neuromorphic datasets, building deep SNNs, optimizing their parameters, and deploying SNNs on neuromorphic chips. Compared to existing methods, the training of deep SNNs can be accelerated $11\times$, and the superior extensibility and flexibility of SpikingJelly enable users to accelerate custom models at low costs through multilevel inheritance and semiautomatic code generation. SpikingJelly paves the way for synthesizing truly energy-efficient SNN-based machine intelligence systems, which will enrich the ecology of neuromorphic computing.

cs.NE

Long-Range Feedback Spiking Network Captures Dynamic and Static Representations of the Visual Cortex under Movie Stimuli

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely used models for investigating biological visual representations. However, existing DNNs are mostly designed to analyze neural responses to static images, relying on feedforward structures and lacking physiological neuronal mechanisms. There is limited insight into how the visual cortex represents natural movie stimuli that contain context-rich information. To address these problems, this work proposes the long-range feedback spiking network (LoRaFB-SNet), which mimics top-down connections between cortical regions and incorporates spike information processing mechanisms inherent to biological neurons. Taking into account the temporal dependence of representations under movie stimuli, we present Time-Series Representational Similarity Analysis (TSRSA) to measure the similarity between model representations and visual cortical representations of mice. LoRaFB-SNet exhibits the highest level of representational similarity, outperforming other well-known and leading alternatives across various experimental paradigms, especially when representing long movie stimuli. We further conduct experiments to quantify how temporal structures (dynamic information) and static textures (static information) of the movie stimuli influence representational similarity, suggesting that our model benefits from long-range feedback to encode context-dependent representations just like the brain. Altogether, LoRaFB-SNet is highly competent in capturing both dynamic and static representations of the mouse visual cortex and contributes to the understanding of movie processing mechanisms of the visual system. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Grasshlw/SNN-Neural-Similarity-Movie.

cs.NE

Deep Spiking Neural Networks with High Representation Similarity Model Visual Pathways of Macaque and Mouse

Deep artificial neural networks (ANNs) play a major role in modeling the visual pathways of primate and rodent. However, they highly simplify the computational properties of neurons compared to their biological counterparts. Instead, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are more biologically plausible models since spiking neurons encode information with time sequences of spikes, just like biological neurons do. However, there is a lack of studies on visual pathways with deep SNNs models. In this study, we model the visual cortex with deep SNNs for the first time, and also with a wide range of state-of-the-art deep CNNs and ViTs for comparison. Using three similarity metrics, we conduct neural representation similarity experiments on three neural datasets collected from two species under three types of stimuli. Based on extensive similarity analyses, we further investigate the functional hierarchy and mechanisms across species. Almost all similarity scores of SNNs are higher than their counterparts of CNNs with an average of 6.6%. Depths of the layers with the highest similarity scores exhibit little differences across mouse cortical regions, but vary significantly across macaque regions, suggesting that the visual processing structure of mice is more regionally homogeneous than that of macaques. Besides, the multi-branch structures observed in some top mouse brain-like neural networks provide computational evidence of parallel processing streams in mice, and the different performance in fitting macaque neural representations under different stimuli exhibits the functional specialization of information processing in macaques. Taken together, our study demonstrates that SNNs could serve as promising candidates to better model and explain the functional hierarchy and mechanisms of the visual system.

q-bio.NC