Learning with Spike Synchrony in Spiking Neural Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Tian, Yuchen, Kembay, Assel, Tensingh, Samuel, Truong, Nhan Duy, Eshraghian, Jason K., Kavehei, Omid
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Tian, Yuchen
Kembay, Assel
Tensingh, Samuel
Truong, Nhan Duy
Eshraghian, Jason K.
Kavehei, Omid
author_facet Tian, Yuchen
Kembay, Assel
Tensingh, Samuel
Truong, Nhan Duy
Eshraghian, Jason K.
Kavehei, Omid
contents Spiking neural networks (SNNs) promise energy-efficient computation by mimicking biological neural dynamics, yet existing plasticity rules focus on isolated spike pairs and fail to leverage the synchronous activity patterns that drive learning in biological systems. We introduce spike-synchrony-dependent plasticity (SSDP), a training approach that adjusts synaptic weights based on the degree of synchronous neural firing rather than spike timing order. Our method operates as a local, post-optimization mechanism that applies updates to sparse parameter subsets, maintaining computational efficiency with linear scaling. SSDP serves as a lightweight event-structure regularizer, biasing the network toward biologically plausible spatio-temporal synchrony while preserving standard convergence behavior. SSDP seamlessly integrates with standard backpropagation while preserving the forward computation graph. We validate our approach across single-layer SNNs and spiking Transformers on datasets from static images to high-temporal-resolution tasks, demonstrating improved convergence stability and enhanced robustness to spike-time jitter and event noise. These findings provide new insights into how biological neural networks might leverage synchronous activity for efficient information processing and suggest that synchrony-dependent plasticity represents a key computational principle underlying neural learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_14841
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning with Spike Synchrony in Spiking Neural Networks
Tian, Yuchen
Kembay, Assel
Tensingh, Samuel
Truong, Nhan Duy
Eshraghian, Jason K.
Kavehei, Omid
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Artificial Intelligence
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) promise energy-efficient computation by mimicking biological neural dynamics, yet existing plasticity rules focus on isolated spike pairs and fail to leverage the synchronous activity patterns that drive learning in biological systems. We introduce spike-synchrony-dependent plasticity (SSDP), a training approach that adjusts synaptic weights based on the degree of synchronous neural firing rather than spike timing order. Our method operates as a local, post-optimization mechanism that applies updates to sparse parameter subsets, maintaining computational efficiency with linear scaling. SSDP serves as a lightweight event-structure regularizer, biasing the network toward biologically plausible spatio-temporal synchrony while preserving standard convergence behavior. SSDP seamlessly integrates with standard backpropagation while preserving the forward computation graph. We validate our approach across single-layer SNNs and spiking Transformers on datasets from static images to high-temporal-resolution tasks, demonstrating improved convergence stability and enhanced robustness to spike-time jitter and event noise. These findings provide new insights into how biological neural networks might leverage synchronous activity for efficient information processing and suggest that synchrony-dependent plasticity represents a key computational principle underlying neural learning.
title Learning with Spike Synchrony in Spiking Neural Networks
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14841