SAFformer:Improving Spiking Transformer via Active Predictive Filtering

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xie, Zequan, Zeng, Weiming, Chen, Yunhua, Ling, Sichang, Chen, Tongyang, Xiao, Jinsheng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Xie, Zequan
Zeng, Weiming
Chen, Yunhua
Ling, Sichang
Chen, Tongyang
Xiao, Jinsheng
author_facet Xie, Zequan
Zeng, Weiming
Chen, Yunhua
Ling, Sichang
Chen, Tongyang
Xiao, Jinsheng
contents Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer notable advantages in biological plausibility and energy efficiency, making them promising candidates for building low-power Transformers. However, existing Spiking Transformers largely adhere to a passive reactive paradigm, which struggles to focus on task-relevant information and incurs substantial computational overhead when processing redundant visual data. To overcome this fundamental yet underexplored limitation, we propose SAFformer, a novel Spiking Transformer architecture based on an active predictive filtering paradigm. Inspired by the brain's predictive coding mechanism, SAFformer actively suppresses predictable signals and focuses on salient visual features. Extensive experiments show that SAFformer establishes new state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10/100 and CIFAR10-DVS. Remarkably, on ImageNet-1K, it achieves 80.50% Top-1 accuracy with only 26.58M parameters and an energy consumption of 5.88 mJ, demonstrating an exceptional balance between accuracy and efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_08270
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SAFformer:Improving Spiking Transformer via Active Predictive Filtering
Xie, Zequan
Zeng, Weiming
Chen, Yunhua
Ling, Sichang
Chen, Tongyang
Xiao, Jinsheng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
68T07
I.2.10
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer notable advantages in biological plausibility and energy efficiency, making them promising candidates for building low-power Transformers. However, existing Spiking Transformers largely adhere to a passive reactive paradigm, which struggles to focus on task-relevant information and incurs substantial computational overhead when processing redundant visual data. To overcome this fundamental yet underexplored limitation, we propose SAFformer, a novel Spiking Transformer architecture based on an active predictive filtering paradigm. Inspired by the brain's predictive coding mechanism, SAFformer actively suppresses predictable signals and focuses on salient visual features. Extensive experiments show that SAFformer establishes new state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10/100 and CIFAR10-DVS. Remarkably, on ImageNet-1K, it achieves 80.50% Top-1 accuracy with only 26.58M parameters and an energy consumption of 5.88 mJ, demonstrating an exceptional balance between accuracy and efficiency.
title SAFformer:Improving Spiking Transformer via Active Predictive Filtering
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
68T07
I.2.10
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08270