S-TLLR: STDP-inspired Temporal Local Learning Rule for Spiking Neural
Networks
S-TLLR: STDP-inspired Temporal Local Learning Rule for Spiking Neural Networks
Marco P. E. Apolinario Kaushik Roy

Abstract
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are biologically plausible models that havebeen identified as potentially apt for deploying energy-efficient intelligenceat the edge, particularly for sequential learning tasks. However, training ofSNNs poses significant challenges due to the necessity for precise temporal andspatial credit assignment. Back-propagation through time (BPTT) algorithm,whilst the most widely used method for addressing these issues, incurs highcomputational cost due to its temporal dependency. In this work, we proposeS-TLLR, a novel three-factor temporal local learning rule inspired by theSpike-Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) mechanism, aimed at training deep SNNson event-based learning tasks. Furthermore, S-TLLR is designed to have lowmemory and time complexities, which are independent of the number of timesteps, rendering it suitable for online learning on low-power edge devices. Todemonstrate the scalability of our proposed method, we have conducted extensiveevaluations on event-based datasets spanning a wide range of applications, suchas image and gesture recognition, audio classification, and optical flowestimation. In all the experiments, S-TLLR achieved high accuracy, comparableto BPTT, with a reduction in memory between 5−50× andmultiply-accumulate (MAC) operations between 1.3−6.6×.
Code Repositories
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Methodology | Metrics |
|---|---|---|
| event-based-optical-flow-on-mvsec | S-TLLR | Average End-Point Error: 3.45 |
| gesture-recognition-on-dvs128-gesture | S-TLLR | Accuracy (%): 97.72 |
| image-classification-on-n-caltech-101 | S-TLLR | Accuracy: 66.05 |
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