Learning from Dense Events: Towards Fast Spiking Neural Networks Training via Event Dataset Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ye, Shuhan, Yu, Yi, Zhang, Qixin, Kong, Chenqi, Wu, Qiangqiang, Wang, Kun, Jiang, Xudong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ye, Shuhan
Yu, Yi
Zhang, Qixin
Kong, Chenqi
Wu, Qiangqiang
Wang, Kun
Jiang, Xudong
author_facet Ye, Shuhan
Yu, Yi
Zhang, Qixin
Kong, Chenqi
Wu, Qiangqiang
Wang, Kun
Jiang, Xudong
contents Event cameras sense brightness changes and output binary asynchronous event streams, attracting increasing attention. Their bio-inspired dynamics align well with spiking neural networks (SNNs), offering a promising energy-efficient alternative to conventional vision systems. However, SNNs remain costly to train due to temporal coding, which limits their practical deployment. To alleviate the high training cost of SNNs, we introduce \textbf{PACE} (Phase-Aligned Condensation for Events), the first dataset distillation framework to SNNs and event-based vision. PACE distills a large training dataset into a compact synthetic one that enables fast SNN training, which is achieved by two core modules: \textbf{ST-DSM} and \textbf{PEQ-N}. ST-DSM uses residual membrane potentials to densify spike-based features (SDR) and to perform fine-grained spatiotemporal matching of amplitude and phase (ST-SM), while PEQ-N provides a plug-and-play straight through probabilistic integer quantizer compatible with standard event-frame pipelines. Across DVS-Gesture, CIFAR10-DVS, and N-MNIST datasets, PACE outperforms existing coreset selection and dataset distillation baselines, with particularly strong gains on dynamic event streams and at low or moderate IPC. Specifically, on N-MNIST, it achieves \(84.4\%\) accuracy, about \(85\%\) of the full training set performance, while reducing training time by more than \(50\times\) and storage cost by \(6000\times\), yielding compact surrogates that enable minute-scale SNN training and efficient edge deployment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_12095
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning from Dense Events: Towards Fast Spiking Neural Networks Training via Event Dataset Distillation
Ye, Shuhan
Yu, Yi
Zhang, Qixin
Kong, Chenqi
Wu, Qiangqiang
Wang, Kun
Jiang, Xudong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Event cameras sense brightness changes and output binary asynchronous event streams, attracting increasing attention. Their bio-inspired dynamics align well with spiking neural networks (SNNs), offering a promising energy-efficient alternative to conventional vision systems. However, SNNs remain costly to train due to temporal coding, which limits their practical deployment. To alleviate the high training cost of SNNs, we introduce \textbf{PACE} (Phase-Aligned Condensation for Events), the first dataset distillation framework to SNNs and event-based vision. PACE distills a large training dataset into a compact synthetic one that enables fast SNN training, which is achieved by two core modules: \textbf{ST-DSM} and \textbf{PEQ-N}. ST-DSM uses residual membrane potentials to densify spike-based features (SDR) and to perform fine-grained spatiotemporal matching of amplitude and phase (ST-SM), while PEQ-N provides a plug-and-play straight through probabilistic integer quantizer compatible with standard event-frame pipelines. Across DVS-Gesture, CIFAR10-DVS, and N-MNIST datasets, PACE outperforms existing coreset selection and dataset distillation baselines, with particularly strong gains on dynamic event streams and at low or moderate IPC. Specifically, on N-MNIST, it achieves \(84.4\%\) accuracy, about \(85\%\) of the full training set performance, while reducing training time by more than \(50\times\) and storage cost by \(6000\times\), yielding compact surrogates that enable minute-scale SNN training and efficient edge deployment.
title Learning from Dense Events: Towards Fast Spiking Neural Networks Training via Event Dataset Distillation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12095