arXiv subjects

Jieyuan Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Jieyuan Zhang.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Spike-driven Vision-Language-Action Model

Vision-language-action (VLA) models bridge multimodal understanding and robotic control, advancing the dominant paradigm for embodied intelligence. However, most existing models rely on large Transformers, whose latency and energy costs hinder deployment on resource-constrained platforms. Through sparse event-driven computation, spiking neural networks offer a promising paradigm for high-performance and energy-efficient computing. Here, we propose the first Spike-driven VLA framework enabling end-to-end direct training for robotic manipulation, which mainly comprises three core components. First, we develop spiking visual and instruction encoders for multimodal perception, encoding visual observations and language instructions into sparse, reliable spike representations for subsequent cross-modal fusion. Then, we introduce Multi-Winner Spike Fusion for instruction-guided scene understanding, using bidirectional top-$k$ winner-take-all spike routing to suppress background interference and yield fused memory. Finally, we propose a Spike Action Chunking Transformer that incorporates spiking cross-attention over the fused memory and the current robot state, enabling efficient end-to-end generation of continuous action chunks for robotic control. Extensive experiments on LIBERO and Meta-World demonstrate that Spike-driven VLA achieves competitive performance with fewer parameters and lower estimated inference energy than conventional VLA models. This work establishes a foundational framework for neuromorphic VLA modeling, paving the way for future advances in resource-efficient embodied intelligence.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

SDTrack: A Baseline for Event-based Tracking via Spiking Neural Networks

Event cameras provide superior temporal resolution, dynamic range, energy efficiency, and pixel bandwidth. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) naturally complement event data through discrete spike signals, making them ideal for event-based tracking. However, current approaches combining Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and SNNs suffer from suboptimal architectures that compromise energy efficiency and limit tracking performance. To address these limitations, we propose the first Transformer-based \textbf{S}pike-\textbf{D}riven \textbf{T}racking (SDTrack) pipeline. It incorporates a novel event frame aggregation method called Global Trajectory Prompt (GTP) and a Transformer-based tracker. The GTP method effectively captures global trajectory information and aggregates it with event streams into event frames to enhance spatiotemporal representation. The Transformer-based tracker comprises a fully spike-driven SNN backbone and a simple tracking head. The SDTrack pipeline operates end-to-end without data augmentation or post-processing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SDTrack-Tiny pipeline achieves competitive accuracy with only 19.61$M$ parameters and 8.16$mJ$ energy consumption, while our Base version achieves state-of-the-art accuracy across three datasets. Our work establishes a solid foundation for future neuromorphic vision research.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2026

Neural Dynamics Self-Attention for Spiking Transformers

Integrating Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) with Transformer architectures offers a promising pathway to balance energy efficiency and performance, particularly for edge vision applications. However, existing Spiking Transformers face two critical challenges: (i) a substantial performance gap compared to their Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) counterparts and (ii) high memory overhead during inference. Through theoretical analysis, we attribute both limitations to the Spiking Self-Attention (SSA) mechanism: the lack of locality bias and the need to store large attention matrices. Inspired by the localized receptive fields (LRF) and membrane-potential dynamics of biological visual neurons, we propose LRF-Dyn, which uses spiking neurons with localized receptive fields to compute attention while reducing memory requirements. Specifically, we introduce a LRF method into SSA to assign higher weights to neighboring regions, strengthening local modeling and improving performance. Building on this, we approximate the resulting attention computation via charge-fire-reset dynamics, eliminating explicit attention-matrix storage and reducing inference-time memory. Extensive experiments on visual tasks confirm that our method reduces memory overhead while delivering significant performance improvements. These results establish it as a key unit for achieving energy-efficient Spiking Transformers.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2025

Training-Free ANN-to-SNN Conversion for High-Performance Spiking Transformer

Leveraging the event-driven paradigm, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising approach for energy-efficient Transformer architectures.While ANN-to-SNN conversion avoids the high training cost of directly trained Spiking Transformers, existing approaches still struggle to handle the nonlinear operations within Transformer blocks, and often require additional fine-tuning of pretrained ANNs.To address these limitations, we propose a training-free and high-performance ANN-to-SNN conversion framework tailored for Transformer architectures. Specifically, we introduce a Multi-basis Exponential Decay (MBE) neuron that combines exponential decay with a multi-basis encoding strategy to effectively approximate nonlinear operations, eliminating the need for weight modifications in pretrained ANNs.Extensive experiments across diverse tasks (CV, NLU, NLG) and mainstream Transformer architectures (ViT, RoBERTa, GPT-2) demonstrate that our method achieves near-lossless conversion accuracy with significantly lower latency. This provides a promising pathway for the efficient and scalable deployment of Spiking Transformers in real-world applications.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

S$^2$NN: Sub-bit Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer an energy-efficient paradigm for machine intelligence, but their continued scaling poses challenges for resource-limited deployment. Despite recent advances in binary SNNs, the storage and computational demands remain substantial for large-scale networks. To further explore the compression and acceleration potential of SNNs, we propose Sub-bit Spiking Neural Networks (S$^2$NNs) that represent weights with less than one bit. Specifically, we first establish an S$^2$NN baseline by leveraging the clustering patterns of kernels in well-trained binary SNNs. This baseline is highly efficient but suffers from \textit{outlier-induced codeword selection bias} during training. To mitigate this issue, we propose an \textit{outlier-aware sub-bit weight quantization} (OS-Quant) method, which optimizes codeword selection by identifying and adaptively scaling outliers. Furthermore, we propose a \textit{membrane potential-based feature distillation} (MPFD) method, improving the performance of highly compressed S$^2$NN via more precise guidance from a teacher model. Extensive results on vision tasks reveal that S$^2$NN outperforms existing quantized SNNs in both performance and efficiency, making it promising for edge computing applications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Unveiling the Spatial-temporal Effective Receptive Fields of Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) demonstrate significant potential for energy-efficient neuromorphic computing through an event-driven paradigm. While training methods and computational models have greatly advanced, SNNs struggle to achieve competitive performance in visual long-sequence modeling tasks. In artificial neural networks, the effective receptive field (ERF) serves as a valuable tool for analyzing feature extraction capabilities in visual long-sequence modeling. Inspired by this, we introduce the Spatio-Temporal Effective Receptive Field (ST-ERF) to analyze the ERF distributions across various Transformer-based SNNs. Based on the proposed ST-ERF, we reveal that these models suffer from establishing a robust global ST-ERF, thereby limiting their visual feature modeling capabilities. To overcome this issue, we propose two novel channel-mixer architectures: \underline{m}ulti-\underline{l}ayer-\underline{p}erceptron-based m\underline{ixer} (MLPixer) and \underline{s}plash-and-\underline{r}econstruct \underline{b}lock (SRB). These architectures enhance global spatial ERF through all timesteps in early network stages of Transformer-based SNNs, improving performance on challenging visual long-sequence modeling tasks. Extensive experiments conducted on the Meta-SDT variants and across object detection and semantic segmentation tasks further validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Beyond these specific applications, we believe the proposed ST-ERF framework can provide valuable insights for designing and optimizing SNN architectures across a broader range of tasks. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/EricZhang1412/Spatial-temporal-ERF}{\faGithub~EricZhang1412/Spatial-temporal-ERF}.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2025

QP-SNN: Quantized and Pruned Spiking Neural Networks

Brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) leverage sparse spikes to encode information and operate in an asynchronous event-driven manner, offering a highly energy-efficient paradigm for machine intelligence. However, the current SNN community focuses primarily on performance improvement by developing large-scale models, which limits the applicability of SNNs in resource-limited edge devices. In this paper, we propose a hardware-friendly and lightweight SNN, aimed at effectively deploying high-performance SNN in resource-limited scenarios. Specifically, we first develop a baseline model that integrates uniform quantization and structured pruning, called QP-SNN baseline. While this baseline significantly reduces storage demands and computational costs, it suffers from performance decline. To address this, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the challenges in quantization and pruning that lead to performance degradation and propose solutions to enhance the baseline's performance. For weight quantization, we propose a weight rescaling strategy that utilizes bit width more effectively to enhance the model's representation capability. For structured pruning, we propose a novel pruning criterion using the singular value of spatiotemporal spike activities to enable more accurate removal of redundant kernels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that integrating two proposed methods into the baseline allows QP-SNN to achieve state-of-the-art performance and efficiency, underscoring its potential for enhancing SNN deployment in edge intelligence computing.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Efficient 3D Recognition with Event-driven Spike Sparse Convolution

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) provide an energy-efficient way to extract 3D spatio-temporal features. Point clouds are sparse 3D spatial data, which suggests that SNNs should be well-suited for processing them. However, when applying SNNs to point clouds, they often exhibit limited performance and fewer application scenarios. We attribute this to inappropriate preprocessing and feature extraction methods. To address this issue, we first introduce the Spike Voxel Coding (SVC) scheme, which encodes the 3D point clouds into a sparse spike train space, reducing the storage requirements and saving time on point cloud preprocessing. Then, we propose a Spike Sparse Convolution (SSC) model for efficiently extracting 3D sparse point cloud features. Combining SVC and SSC, we design an efficient 3D SNN backbone (E-3DSNN), which is friendly with neuromorphic hardware. For instance, SSC can be implemented on neuromorphic chips with only minor modifications to the addressing function of vanilla spike convolution. Experiments on ModelNet40, KITTI, and Semantic KITTI datasets demonstrate that E-3DSNN achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results with remarkable efficiency. Notably, our E-3DSNN (1.87M) obtained 91.7\% top-1 accuracy on ModelNet40, surpassing the current best SNN baselines (14.3M) by 3.0\%. To our best knowledge, it is the first direct training 3D SNN backbone that can simultaneously handle various 3D computer vision tasks (e.g., classification, detection, and segmentation) with an event-driven nature. Code is available: https://github.com/bollossom/E-3DSNN/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Quantized Spike-driven Transformer

Spiking neural networks are emerging as a promising energy-efficient alternative to traditional artificial neural networks due to their spike-driven paradigm. However, recent research in the SNN domain has mainly focused on enhancing accuracy by designing large-scale Transformer structures, which typically rely on substantial computational resources, limiting their deployment on resource-constrained devices. To overcome this challenge, we propose a quantized spike-driven Transformer baseline (QSD-Transformer), which achieves reduced resource demands by utilizing a low bit-width parameter. Regrettably, the QSD-Transformer often suffers from severe performance degradation. In this paper, we first conduct empirical analysis and find that the bimodal distribution of quantized spike-driven self-attention (Q-SDSA) leads to spike information distortion (SID) during quantization, causing significant performance degradation. To mitigate this issue, we take inspiration from mutual information entropy and propose a bi-level optimization strategy to rectify the information distribution in Q-SDSA. Specifically, at the lower level, we introduce an information-enhanced LIF to rectify the information distribution in Q-SDSA. At the upper level, we propose a fine-grained distillation scheme for the QSD-Transformer to align the distribution in Q-SDSA with that in the counterpart ANN. By integrating the bi-level optimization strategy, the QSD-Transformer can attain enhanced energy efficiency without sacrificing its high-performance advantage. For instance, when compared to the prior SNN benchmark on ImageNet, the QSD-Transformer achieves 80.3% top-1 accuracy, accompanied by significant reductions of 6.0$\times$ and 8.1$\times$ in power consumption and model size, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/bollossom/QSD-Transformer.

cs.CV↗