Ning Ning

Ruichen Ma, Liwei Meng, Guanchao Qiao et al.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) promise highly energy-efficient computing, but their adoption is hindered by a critical scarcity of event-stream data. This work introduces I2E, an algorithmic framework that resolves this bottleneck by converting static images into high-fidelity event streams. By simulating microsaccadic eye movements with a highly parallelized convolution, I2E achieves a conversion speed over 300x faster than prior methods, uniquely enabling on-the-fly data augmentation for SNN training. The framework's effectiveness is demonstrated on large-scale benchmarks. An SNN trained on the generated I2E-ImageNet dataset achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy of 60.50%. Critically, this work establishes a powerful sim-to-real paradigm where pre-training on synthetic I2E data and fine-tuning on the real-world CIFAR10-DVS dataset yields an unprecedented accuracy of 92.5%. This result validates that synthetic event data can serve as a high-fidelity proxy for real sensor data, bridging a long-standing gap in neuromorphic engineering. By providing a scalable solution to the data problem, I2E offers a foundational toolkit for developing high-performance neuromorphic systems. The open-source algorithm and all generated datasets are provided to accelerate research in the field.

Wenjian Liu, Ning Ning

The tree reconstruction problem is to collect and analyze massive data at the $n$th level of the tree, to identify whether there is non-vanishing information of the root, as $n$ goes to infinity. Its connection to the clustering problem in the setting of the stochastic block model, which has wide applications in machine learning and data mining, has been well established. For the stochastic block model, an "information-theoretically-solvable-but-computationally-hard" region, or say "hybrid-hard phase", appears whenever the reconstruction bound is not tight of the corresponding reconstruction on the tree problem. Although it has been studied in numerous contexts, the existing literature with rigorous reconstruction thresholds established are very limited, and it becomes extremely challenging when the model under investigation has $4$ states (the stochastic block model with $4$ communities). In this paper, inspired by the newly proposed $q_1+q_2$ stochastic block model, we study a $4$ states symmetric model with different in-block and out-block transition probabilities, and rigorously give the conditions for the non-tightness of the reconstruction threshold.