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A Little Energy Goes a Long Way: Build an Energy-Efficient, Accurate Spiking Neural Network From Convolutional Neural Network

This article conforms to a recent trend of developing an energy-efficient Spiking Neural Network (SNN), which takes advantage of the sophisticated training regime of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and converts a well-trained CNN to an SNN. We observe that the existing CNN-to-SNN conversion algor...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Wu, Dengyu, Yi, Xinping, Huang, Xiaowei
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9179229/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35692427
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2022.759900
Descripción
Sumario:This article conforms to a recent trend of developing an energy-efficient Spiking Neural Network (SNN), which takes advantage of the sophisticated training regime of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and converts a well-trained CNN to an SNN. We observe that the existing CNN-to-SNN conversion algorithms may keep a certain amount of residual current in the spiking neurons in SNN, and the residual current may cause significant accuracy loss when inference time is short. To deal with this, we propose a unified framework to equalize the output of the convolutional or dense layer in CNN and the accumulated current in SNN, and maximally align the spiking rate of a neuron with its corresponding charge. This framework enables us to design a novel explicit current control (ECC) method for the CNN-to-SNN conversion which considers multiple objectives at the same time during the conversion, including accuracy, latency, and energy efficiency. We conduct an extensive set of experiments on different neural network architectures, e.g., VGG, ResNet, and DenseNet, to evaluate the resulting SNNs. The benchmark datasets include not only the image datasets such as CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet but also the Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) image datasets such as DVS-CIFAR-10. The experimental results show the superior performance of our ECC method over the state-of-the-art.