DIET-SNN: Direct Input Encoding With Leakage and Threshold Optimization in Deep Spiking Neural Networks
This work addresses efficiency issues in SNNs for image classification, offering incremental improvements in latency and energy savings for event-driven hardware applications.
The paper tackled the problem of high inference latency and sub-optimal neuron parameters in spiking neural networks (SNNs) by proposing DIET-SNN, which optimizes membrane leak and firing thresholds via gradient descent, achieving 69% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with 5 timesteps and 12x less compute energy than an equivalent ANN.
Bio-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs), operating with asynchronous binary signals (or spikes) distributed over time, can potentially lead to greater computational efficiency on event-driven hardware. The state-of-the-art SNNs suffer from high inference latency, resulting from inefficient input encoding, and sub-optimal settings of the neuron parameters (firing threshold, and membrane leak). We propose DIET-SNN, a low-latency deep spiking network that is trained with gradient descent to optimize the membrane leak and the firing threshold along with other network parameters (weights). The membrane leak and threshold for each layer of the SNN are optimized with end-to-end backpropagation to achieve competitive accuracy at reduced latency. The analog pixel values of an image are directly applied to the input layer of DIET-SNN without the need to convert to spike-train. The first convolutional layer is trained to convert inputs into spikes where leaky-integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons integrate the weighted inputs and generate an output spike when the membrane potential crosses the trained firing threshold. The trained membrane leak controls the flow of input information and attenuates irrelevant inputs to increase the activation sparsity in the convolutional and dense layers of the network. The reduced latency combined with high activation sparsity provides large improvements in computational efficiency. We evaluate DIET-SNN on image classification tasks from CIFAR and ImageNet datasets on VGG and ResNet architectures. We achieve top-1 accuracy of 69% with 5 timesteps (inference latency) on the ImageNet dataset with 12x less compute energy than an equivalent standard ANN. Additionally, DIET-SNN performs 20-500x faster inference compared to other state-of-the-art SNN models.