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Kuan Tao

Publications and source records attributed to Kuan Tao.

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Ternary Spiking Neural Networks Enhanced by Complemented Neurons and Membrane Potential Aggregation

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are promising energy-efficient models and powerful framworks of modeling neuron dynamics. However, existing binary spiking neurons exhibit limited biological plausibilities and low information capacity. Recently developed ternary spiking neuron possesses higher consistency with biological principles (i.e. excitation-inhibition balance mechanism). Despite of this, the ternary spiking neuron suffers from defects including iterative information loss, temporal gradient vanishing and irregular distributions of membrane potentials. To address these issues, we propose Complemented Ternary Spiking Neuron (CTSN), a novel ternary spiking neuron model that incorporates an learnable complemental term to store information from historical inputs. CTSN effectively improves the deficiencies of ternary spiking neuron, while the embedded learnable factors enable CTSN to adaptively adjust neuron dynamics, providing strong neural heterogeneity. Furthermore, based on the temporal evolution features of ternary spiking neurons' membrane potential distributions, we propose the Temporal Membrane Potential Regularization (TMPR) training method. TMPR introduces time-varying regularization strategy utilizing membrane potentials, furhter enhancing the training process by creating extra backpropagation paths. We validate our methods through extensive experiments on various datasets, demonstrating remarkable performance advances.

cs.NE

Temporal Regularization Training: Unleashing the Potential of Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have received widespread attention due to their event-driven and low-power characteristics, making them particularly effective for processing neuromorphic data. Recent studies have shown that directly trained SNNs suffer from severe temporal gradient vanishing and overfitting issues, which fundamentally constrain their performance and generalizability. This paper unveils a temporal regularization training (TRT) memthod, designed to unleash the generalization and performance potential of SNNs through a time-decaying regularization mechanism that prioritizes early timesteps with stronger constraints. We perform theoretical analysis to reveal TRT's ability on mitigating the temporal gradient vanishment. To validate the effectiveness of TRT, we conduct experiments on both static image datasets and dynamic neuromorphic datasets, perform analysis of their results, demonstrating that TRT can effectively mitigate overfitting and help SNNs converge into flatter local minima with better generalizability. Furthermore, we establish a theoretical interpretation of TRT's temporal regularization mechanism by analyzing the temporal information dynamics inside SNNs. We track the Fisher information of SNNs during training process, showing that Fisher information progressively concentrates in early timesteps. The time-decaying regularization mechanism implemented in TRT effectively guides the network to learn robust features in early timesteps with rich information, thereby leading to significant improvements in model generalization.

cs.NE