RMP-SNN: Residual Membrane Potential Neuron for Enabling Deeper High-Accuracy and Low-Latency Spiking Neural Network

Understand

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have recently attracted significant research interest as the third generation of artificial neural networks that can enable low-power event-driven data analytics.

• The best performing SNNs for image recognition tasks are obtained by converting a trained Analog Neural Network (ANN), consisting of Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), to SNN composed of integrate-and-fire neurons with "proper" firing thresholds.
• The converted SNNs typically incur loss in accuracy compared to that provided by the original ANN and require sizable number of inference time-steps to achieve the best accuracy.
• We find that performance degradation in the converted SNN stems from using "hard reset" spiking neuron that is driven to fixed reset potential once its membrane potential exceeds the firing threshold, leading to information loss during SNN inference.