Lingxiao Yang

Jianxiong Tang, Jianhuang Lai, Xiaohua Xie et al.

Spiking neural networks are efficient computation models for low-power environments. Spike-based BP algorithms and ANN-to-SNN (ANN2SNN) conversions are successful techniques for SNN training. Nevertheless, the spike-base BP training is slow and requires large memory costs. Though ANN2NN provides a low-cost way to train SNNs, it requires many inference steps to mimic the well-trained ANN for good performance. In this paper, we propose a SNN-to-ANN (SNN2ANN) framework to train the SNN in a fast and memory-efficient way. The SNN2ANN consists of 2 components: a) a weight sharing architecture between ANN and SNN and b) spiking mapping units. Firstly, the architecture trains the weight-sharing parameters on the ANN branch, resulting in fast training and low memory costs for SNN. Secondly, the spiking mapping units ensure that the activation values of the ANN are the spiking features. As a result, the classification error of the SNN can be optimized by training the ANN branch. Besides, we design an adaptive threshold adjustment (ATA) algorithm to address the noisy spike problem. Experiment results show that our SNN2ANN-based models perform well on the benchmark datasets (CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and Tiny-ImageNet). Moreover, the SNN2ANN can achieve comparable accuracy under 0.625x time steps, 0.377x training time, 0.27x GPU memory costs, and 0.33x spike activities of the Spike-based BP model.

Zixuan Chen, Xiaohua Xie, Lingxiao Yang et al.

Anomaly detectors are widely used in industrial manufacturing to detect and localize unknown defects in query images. These detectors are trained on anomaly-free samples and have successfully distinguished anomalies from most normal samples. However, hard-normal examples are scattered and far apart from most normal samples, and thus they are often mistaken for anomalies by existing methods. To address this issue, we propose Hard-normal Example-aware Template Mutual Matching (HETMM), an efficient framework to build a robust prototype-based decision boundary. Specifically, HETMM employs the proposed Affine-invariant Template Mutual Matching (ATMM) to mitigate the affection brought by the affine transformations and easy-normal examples. By mutually matching the pixel-level prototypes within the patch-level search spaces between query and template set, ATMM can accurately distinguish between hard-normal examples and anomalies, achieving low false-positive and missed-detection rates. In addition, we also propose PTS to compress the original template set for speed-up. PTS selects cluster centres and hard-normal examples to preserve the original decision boundary, allowing this tiny set to achieve comparable performance to the original one. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HETMM outperforms state-of-the-art methods, while using a 60-sheet tiny set can achieve competitive performance and real-time inference speed (around 26.1 FPS) on a Quadro 8000 RTX GPU. HETMM is training-free and can be hot-updated by directly inserting novel samples into the template set, which can promptly address some incremental learning issues in industrial manufacturing.