Yunhua Chen

Zequan Xie, Weiming Zeng, Yunhua Chen et al.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer notable advantages in biological plausibility and energy efficiency, making them promising candidates for building low-power Transformers. However, existing Spiking Transformers largely adhere to a passive reactive paradigm, which struggles to focus on task-relevant information and incurs substantial computational overhead when processing redundant visual data. To overcome this fundamental yet underexplored limitation, we propose SAFformer, a novel Spiking Transformer architecture based on an active predictive filtering paradigm. Inspired by the brain's predictive coding mechanism, SAFformer actively suppresses predictable signals and focuses on salient visual features. Extensive experiments show that SAFformer establishes new state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10/100 and CIFAR10-DVS. Remarkably, on ImageNet-1K, it achieves 80.50% Top-1 accuracy with only 26.58M parameters and an energy consumption of 5.88 mJ, demonstrating an exceptional balance between accuracy and efficiency.

Qian Liu, Yunhua Chen, Steve Furber

We extended the work of proposed activation function, Noisy Softplus, to fit into training of layered up spiking neural networks (SNNs). Thus, any ANN employing Noisy Softplus neurons, even of deep architecture, can be trained simply by the traditional algorithm, for example Back Propagation (BP), and the trained weights can be directly used in the spiking version of the same network without any conversion. Furthermore, the training method can be generalised to other activation units, for instance Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), to train deep SNNs off-line. This research is crucial to provide an effective approach for SNN training, and to increase the classification accuracy of SNNs with biological characteristics and to close the gap between the performance of SNNs and ANNs.