Event-Driven Intrinsic Plasticity for Spiking Convolutional Neural Networks

Enhancing SNN-based spatio-temporal learning: A benchmark dataset and Cross-Modality Attention model

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), renowned for their low power consumption, brain-inspired architecture, and spatio-temporal representation capabilities, have garnered considerable attention in recent years. Similar to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), high-quality benchmark datasets are of great importance to the advances of SNNs. However, our analysis indicates that many prevalent neuromorphic datasets lack strong temporal correlation, preventing SNNs from fully exploiting their spatio-temporal representation capabilities. Meanwhile, the integration of event and frame modalities offers more comprehensive visual spatio-temporal information. Yet, the SNN-based cross-modality fusion remains underexplored. In this work, we present a neuromorphic dataset called DVS-SLR that can better exploit the inherent spatio-temporal properties of SNNs. Compared to existing datasets, it offers advantages in terms of higher temporal correlation, larger scale, and more varied scenarios. In addition, our neuromorphic dataset contains corresponding frame data, which can be used for developing SNN-based fusion methods. By virtue of the dual-modal feature of the dataset, we propose a Cross-Modality Attention (CMA) based fusion method. The CMA model efficiently utilizes the unique advantages of each modality, allowing for SNNs to learn both temporal and spatial attention scores from the spatio-temporal features of event and frame modalities, subsequently allocating these scores across modalities to enhance their synergy. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only improves recognition accuracy but also ensures robustness across diverse scenarios.

Composing recurrent spiking neural networks using locally-recurrent motifs and risk-mitigating architectural optimization

In neural circuits, recurrent connectivity plays a crucial role in network function and stability. However, existing recurrent spiking neural networks (RSNNs) are often constructed by random connections without optimization. While RSNNs can produce rich dynamics that are critical for memory formation and learning, systemic architectural optimization of RSNNs is still an open challenge. We aim to enable systematic design of large RSNNs via a new scalable RSNN architecture and automated architectural optimization. We compose RSNNs based on a layer architecture called Sparsely-Connected Recurrent Motif Layer (SC-ML) that consists of multiple small recurrent motifs wired together by sparse lateral connections. The small size of the motifs and sparse inter-motif connectivity leads to an RSNN architecture scalable to large network sizes. We further propose a method called Hybrid Risk-Mitigating Architectural Search (HRMAS) to systematically optimize the topology of the proposed recurrent motifs and SC-ML layer architecture. HRMAS is an alternating two-step optimization process by which we mitigate the risk of network instability and performance degradation caused by architectural change by introducing a novel biologically-inspired "self-repairing" mechanism through intrinsic plasticity. The intrinsic plasticity is introduced to the second step of each HRMAS iteration and acts as unsupervised fast self-adaptation to structural and synaptic weight modifications introduced by the first step during the RSNN architectural "evolution." We demonstrate that the proposed automatic architecture optimization leads to significant performance gains over existing manually designed RSNNs: we achieve 96.44% on TI46-Alpha, 94.66% on N-TIDIGITS, 90.28% on DVS-Gesture, and 98.72% on N-MNIST. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first work to perform systematic architecture optimization on RSNNs.

Weighted residual network for SAR automatic target recognition with data augmentation

Introduction

Decades of research have been dedicated to overcoming the obstacles inherent in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR). The rise of deep learning technologies has brought a wave of new possibilities, demonstrating significant progress in the field. However, challenges like the susceptibility of SAR images to noise, the requirement for large-scale training datasets, and the often protracted duration of model training still persist.

Methods

This paper introduces a novel data augmentation strategy to address these issues. Our method involves the intentional addition and subsequent removal of speckle noise to artificially enlarge the scope of training data through noise perturbation. Furthermore, we propose a modified network architecture named weighted ResNet, which incorporates residual strain controls for enhanced performance. This network is designed to be computationally efficient and to minimize the amount of training data required.

Results

Through rigorous experimental analysis, our research confirms that the proposed data augmentation method, when used in conjunction with the weighted ResNet model, significantly reduces the time needed for training. It also improves the SAR ATR capabilities.

Discussion

Compared to existing models and methods tested, the combination of our data augmentation scheme and the weighted ResNet framework achieves higher computational efficiency and better recognition accuracy in SAR ATR applications. This suggests that our approach could be a valuable advancement in the field of SAR image analysis.

Robust data hiding for JPEG images with invertible neural network

JPEG compression will cause severe distortion to the shared compressed image, which brings great challenges to extracting messages correctly from the stego image. To address such challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end robust data hiding scheme for JPEG images. The embedding and extracting secret messages on the quantized discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients are implemented by the bi-directional process of the invertible neural network (INN), which can provide intrinsic robustness against lossy JPEG compression. We design a JPEG compression attack module to simulate the JPEG compression process, which helps the network automatically learn how to recover the secret message from JPEG compressed image. Experimental results have demonstrated that our method achieves strong robustness against lossy JPEG compression, and also significantly improves the security compared with the existing data hiding methods on the premise of ensuring image quality and high capacity. For example, the detection error of our method against XuNet has been increased by 3.45% over the existing data hiding methods.

STSC-SNN: Spatio-Temporal Synaptic Connection with temporal convolution and attention for spiking neural networks

Spiking neural networks (SNNs), as one of the algorithmic models in neuromorphic computing, have gained a great deal of research attention owing to temporal information processing capability, low power consumption, and high biological plausibility. The potential to efficiently extract spatio-temporal features makes it suitable for processing event streams. However, existing synaptic structures in SNNs are almost full-connections or spatial 2D convolution, neither of which can extract temporal dependencies adequately. In this work, we take inspiration from biological synapses and propose a Spatio-Temporal Synaptic Connection SNN (STSC-SNN) model to enhance the spatio-temporal receptive fields of synaptic connections, thereby establishing temporal dependencies across layers. Specifically, we incorporate temporal convolution and attention mechanisms to implement synaptic filtering and gating functions. We show that endowing synaptic models with temporal dependencies can improve the performance of SNNs on classification tasks. In addition, we investigate the impact of performance via varied spatial-temporal receptive fields and reevaluate the temporal modules in SNNs. Our approach is tested on neuromorphic datasets, including DVS128 Gesture (gesture recognition), N-MNIST, CIFAR10-DVS (image classification), and SHD (speech digit recognition). The results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art accuracy on nearly all datasets.