Test-Time Adaptation of Spiking Neural Networks for Intracortical Neural Decoding using Membrane Potential Alignment
For brain-computer interface researchers, this work provides an efficient test-time adaptation method that reduces computational cost, enabling potential implantable hardware deployment.
The paper addresses day-to-day neural signal shifts in intracortical brain-computer interfaces. The proposed MPA method achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art NoMAD while using a simpler architecture and finer temporal resolution (4 ms vs. 20 ms).
Intracortical brain-computer interfaces suffer from day-to-day neural signal shifts that degrade pretrained decoders. Existing unsupervised adaptation methods rely on deep recurrent or adversarial architectures that are too computationally expensive for implantable hardware. We propose Membrane Potential Alignment (MPA), a test-time adaptation method for spiking neural networks that realigns a pretrained decoder to shifted recordings by only matching membrane potential distributions via KL divergence. By restricting updates to low-rank (LoRA) weights, MPA adapts fewer than 9% of parameters. On a non-human primate reaching task spanning over one month, MPA achieves performance competitive with the state-of-the-art NoMAD method, while using a simpler architecture and finer temporal resolution (4 ms vs. 20 ms). These results show that efficient SNN-based test-time adaptation is a practical path toward long-term, recalibration-free brain-computer interfaces.