Yan Wang

Yang Li, Xinyi Zeng, Zhe Xue et al.

As the third generation of neural networks, spiking neural networks (SNNs) have recently gained widespread attention for their biological plausibility, energy efficiency, and effectiveness in processing neuromorphic datasets. To better emulate biological neurons, various models such as Integrate-and-Fire (IF) and Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) have been widely adopted in SNNs. However, these neuron models overlook the refractory period, a fundamental characteristic of biological neurons. Research on excitable neurons reveal that after firing, neurons enter a refractory period during which they are temporarily unresponsive to subsequent stimuli. This mechanism is critical for preventing over-excitation and mitigating interference from aberrant signals. Therefore, we propose a simple yet effective method to incorporate the refractory period into spiking LIF neurons through spike-triggered threshold dynamics, termed RPLIF. Our method ensures that each spike accurately encodes neural information, effectively preventing neuron over-excitation under continuous inputs and interference from anomalous inputs. Incorporating the refractory period into LIF neurons is seamless and computationally efficient, enhancing robustness and efficiency while yielding better performance with negligible overhead. To the best of our knowledge, RPLIF achieves state-of-the-art performance on Cifar10-DVS(82.40%) and N-Caltech101(83.35%) with fewer timesteps and demonstrates superior performance on DVS128 Gesture(97.22%) at low latency.

Pin Tang, Chen Zu, Mei Hong et al.

Precise and accurate segmentation of the most common head-and-neck tumor, nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), in MRI sheds light on treatment and regulatory decisions making. However, the large variations in the lesion size and shape of NPC, boundary ambiguity, as well as the limited available annotated samples conspire NPC segmentation in MRI towards a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a Dense SegU-net (DSU-net) framework for automatic NPC segmentation in MRI. Our contribution is threefold. First, different from the traditional decoder in U-net using upconvolution for upsamling, we argue that the restoration from low resolution features to high resolution output should be capable of preserving information significant for precise boundary localization. Hence, we use unpooling to unsample and propose SegU-net. Second, to combat the potential vanishing-gradient problem, we introduce dense blocks which can facilitate feature propagation and reuse. Third, using only cross entropy (CE) as loss function may bring about troubles such as miss-prediction, therefore we propose to use a loss function comprised of both CE loss and Dice loss to train the network. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons are carried out extensively on in-house datasets, the experimental results show that our proposed architecture outperforms the existing state-of-the-art segmentation networks.