PMSN: A Parallel Multi-Compartment Spiking Neuron for Multiscale Temporal Processing

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) hold great potential to realize brain-inspired, energy-efficient computational systems. However, current SNNs still fall short in terms of multiscale temporal processing compared to their biological counterparts. This limitation has resulted in poor performance in many pattern recognition tasks with information that varies across different timescales. To address this issue, we put forward a novel spiking neuron model called the parallel multi-compartment spiking neuron (PMSN). The PMSN emulates biological neurons by incorporating multiple interacting substructures and allows for flexible adjustment of the substructure counts to effectively represent temporal information across diverse timescales. In addition, to address the computational burden associated with the increased complexity of the proposed model, we introduce two parallelization techniques that decouple the temporal dependencies of neuronal updates, enabling parallelized training across different time steps. Our experiments across a wide range of pattern recognition tasks demonstrate that PMSN outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) spiking neuron models in temporal processing capacity and training speed. Specifically, compared with the commonly used leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neuron, PMSN offers more than $10\times $ acceleration and a 30% accuracy improvement on the Sequential CIFAR-10 dataset while maintaining comparable computational cost. Our implementation on neuromorphic hardware further demonstrates the deployability of PMSN and highlights its favorable tradeoff between effectiveness and efficiency. Therefore, the proposed PMSN presents a promising solution to harness the computational advantages of detailed biological neurons, enabling high-performance and efficient temporal processing on neuromorphic computing systems. Code is available at https://github.com/xychen-comp/PMSN.