Unsupervised and efficient learning in sparsely activated convolutional spiking neural networks enabled by voltage-dependent synaptic plasticity
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are gaining attention due to their energy-efficient computing ability, making them relevant for implementation on low-power neuromorphic hardware. Their biological plausibility has permitted them to benefit from unsupervised learning with bio-inspired plasticity rules, such as spike timing-dependent plasticity (STDP). However, standard STDP has some limitations that make it challenging to implement on hardware. In this paper, we propose a convolutional SNN (CSNN) integrating single-spike integrate-and-fire (SSIF) neurons and trained for the first time with voltage-dependent synaptic plasticity (VDSP), a novel unsupervised and local plasticity rule developed for the implementation of STDP on memristive-based neuromorphic hardware. We evaluated the CSNN on the TIDIGITS dataset, where, helped by our sound preprocessing pipeline, we obtained a performance better than the state of the art, with a mean accuracy of 99.43%. Moreover, the use of SSIF neurons, coupled with time-to-first-spike (TTFS) encoding, results in a sparsely activated model, as we recorded a mean of 5036 spikes per input over the 172 580 neurons of the network. This makes the proposed CSNN promising for the development of models that are extremely efficient in energy. We also demonstrate the efficiency of VDSP on the MNIST dataset, where we obtained results comparable to the state of the art, with an accuracy of 98.56%. Our adaptation of VDSP for SSIF neurons introduces a depression factor that has been very effective at reducing the number of training samples needed, and hence, training time, by a factor of two and more, with similar performance.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it