Walters, Ben, Rahimian Kalatehbali, Hamid, Cai, Zhengyu, Genov, Roman, Amirsoleimani, Amirali, Eshraghian, Jason, and Rahimi Azghadi, Mostafa (2024) Efficient sparse spiking auto-encoder for reconstruction, denoising and classification. Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering, 4 (3). 034005.

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Abstract

Auto-encoders are capable of performing input reconstruction, denoising, and classification through an encoder-decoder structure. Spiking Auto-Encoders (SAEs) can utilize asynchronous sparse spikes to improve power efficiency and processing latency on neuromorphic hardware. In our work, we propose an efficient SAE trained using only Spike-Timing-Dependant Plasticity (STDP) learning. Our auto-encoder uses the Time-To-First-Spike (TTFS) encoding scheme and needs to update all synaptic weights only once per input, promoting both training and inference efficiency due to the extreme sparsity. We showcase robust reconstruction performance on the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) and Fashion-MNIST datasets with significantly fewer spikes compared to state-of-the-art SAEs by 1–3 orders of magnitude. Moreover, we achieve robust noise reduction results on the MNIST dataset. When the same noisy inputs are used for classification, accuracy degradation is reduced by 30%–80% compared to prior works. It also exhibits classification accuracies comparable to previous STDP-based classifiers, while remaining competitive with other backpropagation-based spiking classifiers that require global learning through gradients and significantly more spikes for encoding and classification of MNIST/Fashion-MNIST inputs. The presented results demonstrate a promising pathway towards building efficient sparse spiking auto-encoders with local learning, making them highly suited for hardware integration.

Item ID:	85550
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2634-4386
Copyright Information:	© 2024 The Author(s). Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Date Deposited:	20 May 2025 23:38
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