Frontiers in Neuroscience (Mar 2019)

Going Deeper in Spiking Neural Networks: VGG and Residual Architectures

  • Abhronil Sengupta,
  • Yuting Ye,
  • Robert Wang,
  • Chiao Liu,
  • Kaushik Roy

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2019.00095
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 13

Abstract

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Over the past few years, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have become popular as a possible pathway to enable low-power event-driven neuromorphic hardware. However, their application in machine learning have largely been limited to very shallow neural network architectures for simple problems. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithmic technique for generating an SNN with a deep architecture, and demonstrate its effectiveness on complex visual recognition problems such as CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. Our technique applies to both VGG and Residual network architectures, with significantly better accuracy than the state-of-the-art. Finally, we present analysis of the sparse event-driven computations to demonstrate reduced hardware overhead when operating in the spiking domain.

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