Synchrony-Gated Plasticity with Dopamine Modulation for Spiking Neural Networks

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Hauptverfasser: Tian, Yuchen, Tensingh, Samuel, Eshraghian, Jason, Truong, Nhan Duy, Kavehei, Omid
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Tian, Yuchen
Tensingh, Samuel
Eshraghian, Jason
Truong, Nhan Duy
Kavehei, Omid
author_facet Tian, Yuchen
Tensingh, Samuel
Eshraghian, Jason
Truong, Nhan Duy
Kavehei, Omid
contents While surrogate backpropagation proves useful for training deep spiking neural networks (SNNs), incorporating biologically inspired local signals on a large scale remains challenging. This difficulty stems primarily from the high memory demands of maintaining accurate spike-timing logs and the potential for purely local plasticity adjustments to clash with the supervised learning goal. To effectively leverage local signals derived from spiking neuron dynamics, we introduce Dopamine-Modulated Spike-Synchrony-Dependent Plasticity (DA-SSDP), a synchrony-based rule that is sensitive to loss and brings a synchrony-based local learning signal to the model. DA-SSDP condenses spike patterns into a synchrony metric at the batch level. An initial brief warm-up phase assesses its relationship to the task loss and sets a fixed gate that subsequently adjusts the local update's magnitude. In cases where synchrony proves unrelated to the task, the gate settles at one, simplifying DA-SSDP to a basic two-factor synchrony mechanism that delivers minor weight adjustments driven by concurrent spike firing and a Gaussian latency function. These small weight updates are only added to the network`s deeper layers following the backpropagation phase, and our tests showed this simplified version did not degrade performance and sometimes gave a small accuracy boost, serving as a regularizer during training. The rule stores only binary spike indicators and first-spike latencies with a Gaussian kernel. Without altering the model structure or optimization routine, evaluations on benchmarks like CIFAR-10 (+0.42\%), CIFAR-100 (+0.99\%), CIFAR10-DVS (+0.1\%), and ImageNet-1K (+0.73\%) demonstrated consistent accuracy gains, accompanied by a minor increase in computational overhead. Our code is available at https://github.com/NeuroSyd/DA-SSDP.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_07194
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Synchrony-Gated Plasticity with Dopamine Modulation for Spiking Neural Networks
Tian, Yuchen
Tensingh, Samuel
Eshraghian, Jason
Truong, Nhan Duy
Kavehei, Omid
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
While surrogate backpropagation proves useful for training deep spiking neural networks (SNNs), incorporating biologically inspired local signals on a large scale remains challenging. This difficulty stems primarily from the high memory demands of maintaining accurate spike-timing logs and the potential for purely local plasticity adjustments to clash with the supervised learning goal. To effectively leverage local signals derived from spiking neuron dynamics, we introduce Dopamine-Modulated Spike-Synchrony-Dependent Plasticity (DA-SSDP), a synchrony-based rule that is sensitive to loss and brings a synchrony-based local learning signal to the model. DA-SSDP condenses spike patterns into a synchrony metric at the batch level. An initial brief warm-up phase assesses its relationship to the task loss and sets a fixed gate that subsequently adjusts the local update's magnitude. In cases where synchrony proves unrelated to the task, the gate settles at one, simplifying DA-SSDP to a basic two-factor synchrony mechanism that delivers minor weight adjustments driven by concurrent spike firing and a Gaussian latency function. These small weight updates are only added to the network`s deeper layers following the backpropagation phase, and our tests showed this simplified version did not degrade performance and sometimes gave a small accuracy boost, serving as a regularizer during training. The rule stores only binary spike indicators and first-spike latencies with a Gaussian kernel. Without altering the model structure or optimization routine, evaluations on benchmarks like CIFAR-10 (+0.42\%), CIFAR-100 (+0.99\%), CIFAR10-DVS (+0.1\%), and ImageNet-1K (+0.73\%) demonstrated consistent accuracy gains, accompanied by a minor increase in computational overhead. Our code is available at https://github.com/NeuroSyd/DA-SSDP.
title Synchrony-Gated Plasticity with Dopamine Modulation for Spiking Neural Networks
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07194