Efficient sparse spiking auto-encoder for reconstruction, denoising and classification
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Auto-encoders are capable of performing input reconstruction, denoising, and classification through an encoder-decoder structure. Spiking Auto-Encoders (SAEs) can utilize asynchronous sparse spikes to improve power efficiency and processing latency on neuromorphic hardware. In our work, we propose an efficient SAE trained using only Spike-Timing-Dependant Plasticity (STDP) learning. Our auto-encoder uses the Time-To-First-Spike (TTFS) encoding scheme and needs to update all synaptic weights only once per input, promoting both training and inference efficiency due to the extreme sparsity. We showcase robust reconstruction performance on the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) and Fashion-MNIST datasets with significantly fewer spikes compared to state-of-the-art SAEs by 1–3 orders of magnitude. Moreover, we achieve robust noise reduction results on the MNIST dataset. When the same noisy inputs are used for classification, accuracy degradation is reduced by 30%–80% compared to prior works. It also exhibits classification accuracies comparable to previous STDP-based classifiers, while remaining competitive with other backpropagation-based spiking classifiers that require global learning through gradients and significantly more spikes for encoding and classification of MNIST/Fashion-MNIST inputs. The presented results demonstrate a promising pathway towards building efficient sparse spiking auto-encoders with local learning, making them highly suited for hardware integration.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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