STAS: Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Computation Time for Spiking Transformers

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kang, Donghwa, Kim, Doohyun, Ko, Sang-Ki, Lee, Jinkyu, Kang, Brent ByungHoon, Baek, Hyeongboo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916909280133120
author Kang, Donghwa
Kim, Doohyun
Ko, Sang-Ki
Lee, Jinkyu
Kang, Brent ByungHoon
Baek, Hyeongboo
author_facet Kang, Donghwa
Kim, Doohyun
Ko, Sang-Ki
Lee, Jinkyu
Kang, Brent ByungHoon
Baek, Hyeongboo
contents Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer energy efficiency over artificial neural networks (ANNs) but suffer from high latency and computational overhead due to their multi-timestep operational nature. While various dynamic computation methods have been developed to mitigate this by targeting spatial, temporal, or architecture-specific redundancies, they remain fragmented. While the principles of adaptive computation time (ACT) offer a robust foundation for a unified approach, its application to SNN-based vision Transformers (ViTs) is hindered by two core issues: the violation of its temporal similarity prerequisite and a static architecture fundamentally unsuited for its principles. To address these challenges, we propose STAS (Spatio-Temporal Adaptive computation time for Spiking transformers), a framework that co-designs the static architecture and dynamic computation policy. STAS introduces an integrated spike patch splitting (I-SPS) module to establish temporal stability by creating a unified input representation, thereby solving the architectural problem of temporal dissimilarity. This stability, in turn, allows our adaptive spiking self-attention (A-SSA) module to perform two-dimensional token pruning across both spatial and temporal axes. Implemented on spiking Transformer architectures and validated on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet, STAS reduces energy consumption by up to 45.9%, 43.8%, and 30.1%, respectively, while simultaneously improving accuracy over SOTA models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_14138
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle STAS: Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Computation Time for Spiking Transformers
Kang, Donghwa
Kim, Doohyun
Ko, Sang-Ki
Lee, Jinkyu
Kang, Brent ByungHoon
Baek, Hyeongboo
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer energy efficiency over artificial neural networks (ANNs) but suffer from high latency and computational overhead due to their multi-timestep operational nature. While various dynamic computation methods have been developed to mitigate this by targeting spatial, temporal, or architecture-specific redundancies, they remain fragmented. While the principles of adaptive computation time (ACT) offer a robust foundation for a unified approach, its application to SNN-based vision Transformers (ViTs) is hindered by two core issues: the violation of its temporal similarity prerequisite and a static architecture fundamentally unsuited for its principles. To address these challenges, we propose STAS (Spatio-Temporal Adaptive computation time for Spiking transformers), a framework that co-designs the static architecture and dynamic computation policy. STAS introduces an integrated spike patch splitting (I-SPS) module to establish temporal stability by creating a unified input representation, thereby solving the architectural problem of temporal dissimilarity. This stability, in turn, allows our adaptive spiking self-attention (A-SSA) module to perform two-dimensional token pruning across both spatial and temporal axes. Implemented on spiking Transformer architectures and validated on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet, STAS reduces energy consumption by up to 45.9%, 43.8%, and 30.1%, respectively, while simultaneously improving accuracy over SOTA models.
title STAS: Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Computation Time for Spiking Transformers
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14138