Going Deeper With Directly Trained Larger Spiking Neural Networks
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising in a bio plausible coding for spatio temporal information and event driven signal processing, which is very suited for energy efficient implementation in neuromorphic hardware. However, the unique working mode of SNNs makes them more difficult to train than traditional networks. Currently, there are two main routes to explore the training of deep SNNs with high performance. The first is to convert a pre trained ANN model to its SNN version, which usually requires a long coding window for convergence and cannot exploit the spatio temporal features during training for solving temporal tasks. The other is to directly train SNNs in the spatio temporal domain. But due to the binary spike activity of the firing function and the problem of gradient vanishing or explosion, current methods are restricted to shallow architectures and thereby difficult in harnessing large scale datasets (e.g. ImageNet) To this end, we propose a threshold dependent batch normalization (tdBN) method based on the emerging spatio temporal backpropagation, termed "STBP tdBN" enabling direct training of a very deep SNN and the efficient implementation of its inference on neuromorphic hardware. With the proposed method and elaborated shortcut connection, we significantly extend directly trained SNNs from a shallow structure 10 layer) to a very deep structure (50 layers) Furthermore, we theoretically analyze the effectiveness of our method based on "Block Dynamical Isometry" theory. Finally, we report superior accuracy results including 93.15 on CIFAR 10, 67.8 on DVS CIFAR10, and 67.05% on ImageNet with very few timesteps. To our best knowledge, it's the first time to explore the directly trained deep SNNs with high performance on ImageNet.
AAAI