Stabilizing Spiking Neuron Training
This work addresses the problem of optimizing surrogate gradients for spiking neural networks, which is important for researchers in neuromorphic computing to enhance energy efficiency and performance, though it is incremental as it builds on existing SG methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of selecting the best surrogate gradient (SG) for training spiking neurons, which is crucial for energy-efficient neuromorphic computing but often requires extensive grid search. They propose a stability-based theoretical method to choose SG shape and initialization, showing it improves accuracy and reduces the need for grid search, with high initial firing rates and a sparsity loss leading to better generalization depending on the SG.
Stability arguments are often used to prevent learning algorithms from having ever increasing activity and weights that hinder generalization. However, stability conditions can clash with the sparsity required to augment the energy efficiency of spiking neurons. Nonetheless it can also provide solutions. In fact, spiking Neuromorphic Computing uses binary activity to improve Artificial Intelligence energy efficiency. However, its non-smoothness requires approximate gradients, known as Surrogate Gradients (SG), to close the performance gap with Deep Learning. Several SG have been proposed in the literature, but it remains unclear how to determine the best SG for a given task and network. Thus, we aim at theoretically define the best SG, through stability arguments, to reduce the need for grid search. In fact, we show that more complex tasks and networks need more careful choice of SG, even if overall the derivative of the fast sigmoid tends to outperform the other, for a wide range of learning rates. We therefore design a stability based theoretical method to choose initialization and SG shape before training on the most common spiking neuron, the Leaky Integrate and Fire (LIF). Since our stability method suggests the use of high firing rates at initialization, which is non-standard in the neuromorphic literature, we show that high initial firing rates, combined with a sparsity encouraging loss term introduced gradually, can lead to better generalization, depending on the SG shape. Our stability based theoretical solution, finds a SG and initialization that experimentally result in improved accuracy. We show how it can be used to reduce the need of extensive grid-search of dampening, sharpness and tail-fatness of the SG. We also show that our stability concepts can be extended to be applicable on different LIF variants, such as DECOLLE and fluctuations-driven initializations.