Spiking Vision Transformer with Saccadic Attention

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wang, Shuai, Zhang, Malu, Zhang, Dehao, Belatreche, Ammar, Xiao, Yichen, Liang, Yu, Shan, Yimeng, Sun, Qian, Zhang, Enqi, Yang, Yang
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Wang, Shuai
Zhang, Malu
Zhang, Dehao
Belatreche, Ammar
Xiao, Yichen
Liang, Yu
Shan, Yimeng
Sun, Qian
Zhang, Enqi
Yang, Yang
author_facet Wang, Shuai
Zhang, Malu
Zhang, Dehao
Belatreche, Ammar
Xiao, Yichen
Liang, Yu
Shan, Yimeng
Sun, Qian
Zhang, Enqi
Yang, Yang
contents The combination of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) holds potential for achieving both energy efficiency and high performance, particularly suitable for edge vision applications. However, a significant performance gap still exists between SNN-based ViTs and their ANN counterparts. Here, we first analyze why SNN-based ViTs suffer from limited performance and identify a mismatch between the vanilla self-attention mechanism and spatio-temporal spike trains. This mismatch results in degraded spatial relevance and limited temporal interactions. To address these issues, we draw inspiration from biological saccadic attention mechanisms and introduce an innovative Saccadic Spike Self-Attention (SSSA) method. Specifically, in the spatial domain, SSSA employs a novel spike distribution-based method to effectively assess the relevance between Query and Key pairs in SNN-based ViTs. Temporally, SSSA employs a saccadic interaction module that dynamically focuses on selected visual areas at each timestep and significantly enhances whole scene understanding through temporal interactions. Building on the SSSA mechanism, we develop a SNN-based Vision Transformer (SNN-ViT). Extensive experiments across various visual tasks demonstrate that SNN-ViT achieves state-of-the-art performance with linear computational complexity. The effectiveness and efficiency of the SNN-ViT highlight its potential for power-critical edge vision applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_12677
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Spiking Vision Transformer with Saccadic Attention
Wang, Shuai
Zhang, Malu
Zhang, Dehao
Belatreche, Ammar
Xiao, Yichen
Liang, Yu
Shan, Yimeng
Sun, Qian
Zhang, Enqi
Yang, Yang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
The combination of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) holds potential for achieving both energy efficiency and high performance, particularly suitable for edge vision applications. However, a significant performance gap still exists between SNN-based ViTs and their ANN counterparts. Here, we first analyze why SNN-based ViTs suffer from limited performance and identify a mismatch between the vanilla self-attention mechanism and spatio-temporal spike trains. This mismatch results in degraded spatial relevance and limited temporal interactions. To address these issues, we draw inspiration from biological saccadic attention mechanisms and introduce an innovative Saccadic Spike Self-Attention (SSSA) method. Specifically, in the spatial domain, SSSA employs a novel spike distribution-based method to effectively assess the relevance between Query and Key pairs in SNN-based ViTs. Temporally, SSSA employs a saccadic interaction module that dynamically focuses on selected visual areas at each timestep and significantly enhances whole scene understanding through temporal interactions. Building on the SSSA mechanism, we develop a SNN-based Vision Transformer (SNN-ViT). Extensive experiments across various visual tasks demonstrate that SNN-ViT achieves state-of-the-art performance with linear computational complexity. The effectiveness and efficiency of the SNN-ViT highlight its potential for power-critical edge vision applications.
title Spiking Vision Transformer with Saccadic Attention
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12677