On Reducing Activity with Distillation and Regularization for Energy Efficient Spiking Neural Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Louis, Thomas, Miramond, Benoit, Pegatoquet, Alain, Girard, Adrien
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Louis, Thomas
Miramond, Benoit
Pegatoquet, Alain
Girard, Adrien
author_facet Louis, Thomas
Miramond, Benoit
Pegatoquet, Alain
Girard, Adrien
contents Interest in spiking neural networks (SNNs) has been growing steadily, promising an energy-efficient alternative to formal neural networks (FNNs), commonly known as artificial neural networks (ANNs). Despite increasing interest, especially for Edge applications, these event-driven neural networks suffered from their difficulty to be trained compared to FNNs. To alleviate this problem, a number of innovative methods have been developed to provide performance more or less equivalent to that of FNNs. However, the spiking activity of a network during inference is usually not considered. While SNNs may usually have performance comparable to that of FNNs, it is often at the cost of an increase of the network's activity, thus limiting the benefit of using them as a more energy-efficient solution. In this paper, we propose to leverage Knowledge Distillation (KD) for SNNs training with surrogate gradient descent in order to optimize the trade-off between performance and spiking activity. Then, after understanding why KD led to an increase in sparsity, we also explored Activations regularization and proposed a novel method with Logits Regularization. These approaches, validated on several datasets, clearly show a reduction in network spiking activity (-26.73% on GSC and -14.32% on CIFAR-10) while preserving accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_18350
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Reducing Activity with Distillation and Regularization for Energy Efficient Spiking Neural Networks
Louis, Thomas
Miramond, Benoit
Pegatoquet, Alain
Girard, Adrien
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image and Video Processing
Interest in spiking neural networks (SNNs) has been growing steadily, promising an energy-efficient alternative to formal neural networks (FNNs), commonly known as artificial neural networks (ANNs). Despite increasing interest, especially for Edge applications, these event-driven neural networks suffered from their difficulty to be trained compared to FNNs. To alleviate this problem, a number of innovative methods have been developed to provide performance more or less equivalent to that of FNNs. However, the spiking activity of a network during inference is usually not considered. While SNNs may usually have performance comparable to that of FNNs, it is often at the cost of an increase of the network's activity, thus limiting the benefit of using them as a more energy-efficient solution. In this paper, we propose to leverage Knowledge Distillation (KD) for SNNs training with surrogate gradient descent in order to optimize the trade-off between performance and spiking activity. Then, after understanding why KD led to an increase in sparsity, we also explored Activations regularization and proposed a novel method with Logits Regularization. These approaches, validated on several datasets, clearly show a reduction in network spiking activity (-26.73% on GSC and -14.32% on CIFAR-10) while preserving accuracy.
title On Reducing Activity with Distillation and Regularization for Energy Efficient Spiking Neural Networks
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18350