Brain-Inspired Architecture for Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking neural networks (SNNs), using action potentials (spikes) to represent and transmit information, are more biologically plausible than traditional artificial neural networks. However, most of the existing SNNs require a separate preprocessing step to convert the real-valued input into spikes that are then input to the network for processing. The dissected spike-coding process may result in information loss, leading to degenerated performance. However, the biological neuron system does not perform a separate preprocessing step. Moreover, the nervous system may not have a single pathway with which to respond and process external stimuli but allows multiple circuits to perceive the same stimulus. Inspired by these advantageous aspects of the biological neural system, we propose a self-adaptive encoding spike neural network with parallel architecture. The proposed network integrates the input-encoding process into the spiking neural network architecture via convolutional operations such that the network can accept the real-valued input and automatically transform it into spikes for further processing. Meanwhile, the proposed network contains two identical parallel branches, inspired by the biological nervous system that processes information in both serial and parallel. The experimental results on multiple image classification tasks reveal that the proposed network can obtain competitive performance, suggesting the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.