Aug 2026· Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering· Vol 6· 0 citations· 56 references
Physics
TL;DR
This study identifies a critical vulnerability in SNNs on recently established bit-based codes: consistent performance degradation when temporal spike encoding orders are reversed, and measures the per-timestep class-mutual-information profile of six encodings directly and shows that the resulting concordance ordering predicts the observed degradation.
Abstract
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer an energy-efficient alternative to traditional neural networks by utilizing discrete, temporally precise spike events. However, this study identifies a critical vulnerability in SNNs on recently established bit-based codes: consistent performance degradation when temporal spike encoding orders are reversed, such as using least-significant-bit ordering instead of most-significant-bit. We theoretically formalize this phenomenon as premature state annihilation, wherein early noisy spikes in information-discordant encodings trigger hard resets in leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons. These resets erase accumulated membrane state and, because the effective temporal influence of an input is largest for early timesteps, leave the backpropagated learning signal concentrated where the information is not. We measure the per-timestep class-mutual-information profile of six encodings directly, without reference to network accuracy, and show that the resulting concordance ordering predicts the observed degradation. While dense codes like weighted phase encoding suffer catastrophic drops (up to 48%), sparse codes like time-to-first-spike remain robust, and exchangeable rate codes are provably invariant to reversal. We evaluate several mitigation strategies, finding that parametric LIF (PLIF) neurons and aggressive membrane leakage significantly recover performance by adapting to or suppressing early noise.
Extensive experiments on static and neuromorphic benchmarks show that lower-bit BASC models match or outperform higher-bit baselines and retain this accuracy advantage after structured pruning, while further reducing model storage and synaptic operations.
Linliang Chen, Yan Zhong, Xin Liu et al.· 0 citations
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have garnered significant attention in reinforcement learning tasks for their low power consumption. However, traditional spiking reinforcement learning (SRL) methods, which rely on local-connected encoding and fixed-threshold learning, struggle to capture the inter-dimensional correlations of input information within short timesteps, limiting the network’s expressive capacity at low timesteps. While increasing timesteps can significantly enhance performance, excessive timesteps result in substantial delays. To address this contradiction and enhance the expressive and decision-making capabilities of SNNs within short timesteps, we propose Mask-Adaptive Global Connection (MAGC), a novel encoding method that efficiently captures long-range dependencies via sparse, adaptively masked connections—enabling global feature interaction in a single timestep. Additionally, dynamic-threshold spiking neurons are introduced to effectively capture and distinguish subtle changes in input signals at each timestep, thereby enhancing the spatial-temporal state representation during spike information transmission. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art algorithms using only a single timestep, while significantly reducing inference latency and energy consumption. When extended to multiple timesteps, our approach consistently outperforms existing methods, showing substantial improvements across eight continuous control tasks from OpenAI Gym.
Rong Xiao, Zhiyuan Hu, Ping He et al.· IEEE Transactions on Image P...· 0 citations
This work proposes a noisy group neuron (NGN) model, which incorporates population-level synchronous resetting and neural stochasticity as fundamental computational mechanisms, and develops the NGN method as a framework that combines the NGN model with backpropagation learning based on mean-field dynamics.
Yajie Zhai, Yanmei Kang, Meng Li et al.· 0 citations
Large-scale spiking neural network simulation requires numerical integration that preserves membrane dynamics and spike timing without making fine-resolution updates prohibitively expensive. This balance is difficult for conductance-based leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) networks because synaptic decay, threshold crossings, resets, and refractory periods form a hybrid dynamical system. To address this difficulty, we introduce a spike-aware propagation (SAP) approximation method that combines exact receptor-trace updates, analytic homogeneous membrane propagation, Gauss–Legendre quadrature, and spike localization, improving the accuracy–efficiency Pareto frontier. We establish an error bound and conditional convergence under consistent refinement for the proposed SAP. At h = 1 ms, the single-realization T = 1000 ms comparison showed a lower voltage RMSE for SAP than for Euler at the same width in the two high-activity regimes. The five-seed T = 200 ms robustness experiment likewise showed lower voltage RMSE for SAP than for NEST at the same width. At the highest drive, the paired mean reduction was 3.91 mV (95% CI, 3.85–3.97 mV). This quantified gain supports SAP as a practical route to an improved accuracy–efficiency balance in large-scale conductance-based LIF simulation while underscoring the method’s configuration-dependent and regime-dependent scope.
Yi Yu, Qibao Zheng, Wenlian Lu· Axioms· 0 citations
This work proposes Burst Spiking Neural Networks (BuSNNs), built upon Burst-enhanced Spiking Neurons and a Dynamic Weight Constraint (DWC) mechanism, which mitigates perturbation-induced transitions in activation states and thereby enhances robustness.
Jiahong Zhang, Sijun Shen, Man Yao et al.· 0 citations
This work revisits SNN robustness from an information-theoretic perspective and reveals the pivotal role of temporal characteristics, and proposes a Temporal Mutual Information (TMI) regularizer that explicitly exploits temporal characteristics to enhance robustness.