Time-Reduced Model for Multilayer Spiking Neural Networks

Abstract

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) is a type of biological neural network model, which is more biologically plausible and computationally powerful than traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs). SNNs can achieve the same goals as ANNs, and can build a large-scale network structure (i.e. deep spiking neural network) to accomplish complex tasks. However, training deep spiking neural network is difficult due to the non-differentiable nature of spike events, and it requires much computation time during the training period. In this paper, a time-reduced model adopting two methods is presented for reducing the computation time of a deep spiking neural network (i.e. approximating the spike response function by the piecewise linear method, and choosing the suitable number of sub-synapses). The experimental results show that the methods of piecewise linear approximation and choosing the suitable number of sub-synapses is effective. This method can not only reduce the training time but also simplify the network structure. With the piecewise linear approximation method, the half of computation time of the original model can be reduced by at least. With the rule of choosing the number of sub-synapses, the computation time of less than one-tenth of the original model can be reduced for XOR and Iris tasks.