Daily Papers

Synthetic Lunar Terrain (SLT) is an open dataset collected from an analogue test site for lunar missions, featuring synthetic craters in a high-contrast lighting setup. It includes several side-by-side captures from event-based and conventional RGB cameras, supplemented with a high-resolution 3D laser scan for depth estimation. The event-stream recorded from the neuromorphic vision sensor of the event-based camera is of particular interest as this emerging technology provides several unique advantages, such as high data rates, low energy consumption and resilience towards scenes of high dynamic range. SLT provides a solid foundation to analyse the limits of RGB-cameras and potential advantages or synergies in utilizing neuromorphic visions with the goal of enabling and improving lunar specific applications like rover navigation, landing in cratered environments or similar.

Wide-scale use of visual surveillance in public spaces puts individual privacy at stake while increasing resource consumption (energy, bandwidth, and computation). Neuromorphic vision sensors (event-cameras) have been recently considered a valid solution to the privacy issue because they do not capture detailed RGB visual information of the subjects in the scene. However, recent deep learning architectures have been able to reconstruct images from event cameras with high fidelity, reintroducing a potential threat to privacy for event-based vision applications. In this paper, we aim to anonymize event-streams to protect the identity of human subjects against such image reconstruction attacks. To achieve this, we propose an end-to-end network architecture jointly optimized for the twofold objective of preserving privacy and performing a downstream task such as person ReId. Our network learns to scramble events, enforcing the degradation of images recovered from the privacy attacker. In this work, we also bring to the community the first ever event-based person ReId dataset gathered to evaluate the performance of our approach. We validate our approach with extensive experiments and report results on the synthetic event data simulated from the publicly available SoftBio dataset and our proposed Event-ReId dataset.

Due to the high activation sparsity and use of accumulates (AC) instead of expensive multiply-and-accumulates (MAC), neuromorphic spiking neural networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising low-power alternative to traditional DNNs for several computer vision (CV) applications. However, most existing SNNs require multiple time steps for acceptable inference accuracy, hindering real-time deployment and increasing spiking activity and, consequently, energy consumption. Recent works proposed direct encoding that directly feeds the analog pixel values in the first layer of the SNN in order to significantly reduce the number of time steps. Although the overhead for the first layer MACs with direct encoding is negligible for deep SNNs and the CV processing is efficient using SNNs, the data transfer between the image sensors and the downstream processing costs significant bandwidth and may dominate the total energy. To mitigate this concern, we propose an in-sensor computing hardware-software co-design framework for SNNs targeting image recognition tasks. Our approach reduces the bandwidth between sensing and processing by 12-96x and the resulting total energy by 2.32x compared to traditional CV processing, with a 3.8% reduction in accuracy on ImageNet.

Neuromorphic vision is a bio-inspired technology that has triggered a paradigm shift in the computer-vision community and is serving as a key-enabler for a multitude of applications. This technology has offered significant advantages including reduced power consumption, reduced processing needs, and communication speed-ups. However, neuromorphic cameras suffer from significant amounts of measurement noise. This noise deteriorates the performance of neuromorphic event-based perception and navigation algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel noise filtration algorithm to eliminate events which do not represent real log-intensity variations in the observed scene. We employ a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-driven transformer algorithm, called GNN-Transformer, to classify every active event pixel in the raw stream into real-log intensity variation or noise. Within the GNN, a message-passing framework, called EventConv, is carried out to reflect the spatiotemporal correlation among the events, while preserving their asynchronous nature. We also introduce the Known-object Ground-Truth Labeling (KoGTL) approach for generating approximate ground truth labels of event streams under various illumination conditions. KoGTL is used to generate labeled datasets, from experiments recorded in chalenging lighting conditions. These datasets are used to train and extensively test our proposed algorithm. When tested on unseen datasets, the proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods by 8.8% in terms of filtration accuracy. Additional tests are also conducted on publicly available datasets to demonstrate the generalization capabilities of the proposed algorithm in the presence of illumination variations and different motion dynamics. Compared to existing solutions, qualitative results verified the superior capability of the proposed algorithm to eliminate noise while preserving meaningful scene events.

Neuromorphic systems, inspired by the complexity and functionality of the human brain, have gained interest in academic and industrial attention due to their unparalleled potential across a wide range of applications. While their capabilities herald innovation, it is imperative to underscore that these computational paradigms, analogous to their traditional counterparts, are not impervious to security threats. Although the exploration of neuromorphic methodologies for image and video processing has been rigorously pursued, the realm of neuromorphic audio processing remains in its early stages. Our results highlight the robustness and precision of our FPGA-based neuromorphic system. Specifically, our system showcases a commendable balance between desired signal and background noise, efficient spike rate encoding, and unparalleled resilience against adversarial attacks such as FGSM and PGD. A standout feature of our framework is its detection rate of 94%, which, when compared to other methodologies, underscores its greater capability in identifying and mitigating threats within 5.39 dB, a commendable SNR ratio. Furthermore, neuromorphic computing and hardware security serve many sensor domains in mission-critical and privacy-preserving applications.

Neuromorphic sensors, specifically event cameras, revolutionize visual data acquisition by capturing pixel intensity changes with exceptional dynamic range, minimal latency, and energy efficiency, setting them apart from conventional frame-based cameras. The distinctive capabilities of event cameras have ignited significant interest in the domain of event-based action recognition, recognizing their vast potential for advancement. However, the development in this field is currently slowed by the lack of comprehensive, large-scale datasets, which are critical for developing robust recognition frameworks. To bridge this gap, we introduces DailyDVS-200, a meticulously curated benchmark dataset tailored for the event-based action recognition community. DailyDVS-200 is extensive, covering 200 action categories across real-world scenarios, recorded by 47 participants, and comprises more than 22,000 event sequences. This dataset is designed to reflect a broad spectrum of action types, scene complexities, and data acquisition diversity. Each sequence in the dataset is annotated with 14 attributes, ensuring a detailed characterization of the recorded actions. Moreover, DailyDVS-200 is structured to facilitate a wide range of research paths, offering a solid foundation for both validating existing approaches and inspiring novel methodologies. By setting a new benchmark in the field, we challenge the current limitations of neuromorphic data processing and invite a surge of new approaches in event-based action recognition techniques, which paves the way for future explorations in neuromorphic computing and beyond. The dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/QiWang233/DailyDVS-200.

Neuromorphic computing, which exploits Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) on neuromorphic chips, is a promising energy-efficient alternative to traditional AI. CNN-based SNNs are the current mainstream of neuromorphic computing. By contrast, no neuromorphic chips are designed especially for Transformer-based SNNs, which have just emerged, and their performance is only on par with CNN-based SNNs, offering no distinct advantage. In this work, we propose a general Transformer-based SNN architecture, termed as ``Meta-SpikeFormer", whose goals are: 1) Lower-power, supports the spike-driven paradigm that there is only sparse addition in the network; 2) Versatility, handles various vision tasks; 3) High-performance, shows overwhelming performance advantages over CNN-based SNNs; 4) Meta-architecture, provides inspiration for future next-generation Transformer-based neuromorphic chip designs. Specifically, we extend the Spike-driven Transformer in yao2023spike into a meta architecture, and explore the impact of structure, spike-driven self-attention, and skip connection on its performance. On ImageNet-1K, Meta-SpikeFormer achieves 80.0\% top-1 accuracy (55M), surpassing the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) SNN baselines (66M) by 3.7\%. This is the first direct training SNN backbone that can simultaneously supports classification, detection, and segmentation, obtaining SOTA results in SNNs. Finally, we discuss the inspiration of the meta SNN architecture for neuromorphic chip design. Source code and models are available at https://github.com/BICLab/Spike-Driven-Transformer-V2.

Event cameras are a type of novel neuromorphic sen-sor that has been gaining increasing attention. Existing event-based backbones mainly rely on image-based designs to extract spatial information within the image transformed from events, overlooking important event properties like time and polarity. To address this issue, we propose a novel Group-based vision Transformer backbone for Event-based vision, called Group Event Transformer (GET), which de-couples temporal-polarity information from spatial infor-mation throughout the feature extraction process. Specifi-cally, we first propose a new event representation for GET, named Group Token, which groups asynchronous events based on their timestamps and polarities. Then, GET ap-plies the Event Dual Self-Attention block, and Group Token Aggregation module to facilitate effective feature commu-nication and integration in both the spatial and temporal-polarity domains. After that, GET can be integrated with different downstream tasks by connecting it with vari-ous heads. We evaluate our method on four event-based classification datasets (Cifar10-DVS, N-MNIST, N-CARS, and DVS128Gesture) and two event-based object detection datasets (1Mpx and Gen1), and the results demonstrate that GET outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Peterande/GET-Group-Event-Transformer.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) promise highly energy-efficient computing, but their adoption is hindered by a critical scarcity of event-stream data. This work introduces I2E, an algorithmic framework that resolves this bottleneck by converting static images into high-fidelity event streams. By simulating microsaccadic eye movements with a highly parallelized convolution, I2E achieves a conversion speed over 300x faster than prior methods, uniquely enabling on-the-fly data augmentation for SNN training. The framework's effectiveness is demonstrated on large-scale benchmarks. An SNN trained on the generated I2E-ImageNet dataset achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy of 60.50%. Critically, this work establishes a powerful sim-to-real paradigm where pre-training on synthetic I2E data and fine-tuning on the real-world CIFAR10-DVS dataset yields an unprecedented accuracy of 92.5%. This result validates that synthetic event data can serve as a high-fidelity proxy for real sensor data, bridging a long-standing gap in neuromorphic engineering. By providing a scalable solution to the data problem, I2E offers a foundational toolkit for developing high-performance neuromorphic systems. The open-source algorithm and all generated datasets are provided to accelerate research in the field.

Recent advancements in bio-inspired visual sensing and neuromorphic computing have led to the development of various highly efficient bio-inspired solutions with real-world applications. One notable application integrates event-based cameras with spiking neural networks (SNNs) to process event-based sequences that are asynchronous and sparse, making them difficult to handle. In this project, we develop a convolutional spiking neural network (CSNN) architecture that leverages convolutional operations and recurrent properties of a spiking neuron to learn the spatial and temporal relations in the ASL-DVS gesture dataset. The ASL-DVS gesture dataset is a neuromorphic dataset containing hand gestures when displaying 24 letters (A to Y, excluding J and Z due to the nature of their symbols) from the American Sign Language (ASL). We performed classification on a pre-processed subset of the full ASL-DVS dataset to identify letter signs and achieved 100\% training accuracy. Specifically, this was achieved by training in the Google Cloud compute platform while using a learning rate of 0.0005, batch size of 25 (total of 20 batches), 200 iterations, and 10 epochs.

As large language models continue to scale in size rapidly, so too does the computational power required to run them. Event-based networks on neuromorphic devices offer a potential way to reduce energy consumption for inference significantly. However, to date, most event-based networks that can run on neuromorphic hardware, including spiking neural networks (SNNs), have not achieved task performance even on par with LSTM models for language modeling. As a result, language modeling on neuromorphic devices has seemed a distant prospect. In this work, we demonstrate the first-ever implementation of a language model on a neuromorphic device - specifically the SpiNNaker 2 chip - based on a recently published event-based architecture called the EGRU. SpiNNaker 2 is a many-core neuromorphic chip designed for large-scale asynchronous processing, while the EGRU is architected to leverage such hardware efficiently while maintaining competitive task performance. This implementation marks the first time a neuromorphic language model matches LSTMs, setting the stage for taking task performance to the level of large language models. We also demonstrate results on a gesture recognition task based on inputs from a DVS camera. Overall, our results showcase the feasibility of this neuro-inspired neural network in hardware, highlighting significant gains versus conventional hardware in energy efficiency for the common use case of single batch inference.

Neuromorphic models take inspiration from the human brain by adopting bio-plausible neuron models to build alternatives to traditional Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) solutions. The scarce availability of dedicated hardware able to actualize the emulation of brain-inspired computation, which is otherwise only simulated, yet still hinders the wide adoption of neuromorphic computing for edge devices and embedded systems. With this premise, we adopt the perspective of neuromorphic computing for conventional hardware and we present the L2MU, a natively neuromorphic Legendre Memory Unit (LMU) which entirely relies on Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neurons. Specifically, the original recurrent architecture of LMU has been redesigned by modelling every constituent element with neural populations made of LIF or Current-Based (CuBa) LIF neurons. To couple neuromorphic computing and off-the-shelf edge devices, we equipped the L2MU with an input module for the conversion of real values into spikes, which makes it an encoding-free implementation of a Recurrent Spiking Neural Network (RSNN) able to directly work with raw sensor signals on non-dedicated hardware. As a use case to validate our network, we selected the task of Human Activity Recognition (HAR). We benchmarked our L2MU on smartwatch signals from hand-oriented activities, deploying it on three different commercial edge devices in compressed versions too. The reported results remark the possibility of considering neuromorphic models not only in an exclusive relationship with dedicated hardware but also as a suitable choice to work with common sensors and devices.

Neuromorphic computing with spiking neural networks is promising for energy-efficient artificial intelligence (AI) applications. However, different from humans who continually learn different tasks in a lifetime, neural network models suffer from catastrophic forgetting. How could neuronal operations solve this problem is an important question for AI and neuroscience. Many previous studies draw inspiration from observed neuroscience phenomena and propose episodic replay or synaptic metaplasticity, but they are not guaranteed to explicitly preserve knowledge for neuron populations. Other works focus on machine learning methods with more mathematical grounding, e.g., orthogonal projection on high dimensional spaces, but there is no neural correspondence for neuromorphic computing. In this work, we develop a new method with neuronal operations based on lateral connections and Hebbian learning, which can protect knowledge by projecting activity traces of neurons into an orthogonal subspace so that synaptic weight update will not interfere with old tasks. We show that Hebbian and anti-Hebbian learning on recurrent lateral connections can effectively extract the principal subspace of neural activities and enable orthogonal projection. This provides new insights into how neural circuits and Hebbian learning can help continual learning, and also how the concept of orthogonal projection can be realized in neuronal systems. Our method is also flexible to utilize arbitrary training methods based on presynaptic activities/traces. Experiments show that our method consistently solves forgetting for spiking neural networks with nearly zero forgetting under various supervised training methods with different error propagation approaches, and outperforms previous approaches under various settings. Our method can pave a solid path for building continual neuromorphic computing systems.

Context-sensitive two-point layer 5 pyramidal cells (L5PCs) were discovered as long ago as 1999. However, the potential of this discovery to provide useful neural computation has yet to be demonstrated. Here we show for the first time how a transformative L5PCs-driven deep neural network (DNN), termed the multisensory cooperative computing (MCC) architecture, can effectively process large amounts of heterogeneous real-world audio-visual (AV) data, using far less energy compared to best available 'point' neuron-driven DNNs. A novel highly-distributed parallel implementation on a Xilinx UltraScale+ MPSoC device estimates energy savings up to 245759 times 50000 muJ (i.e., 62% less than the baseline model in a semi-supervised learning setup) where a single synapse consumes 8e^{-5}muJ. In a supervised learning setup, the energy-saving can potentially reach up to 1250x less (per feedforward transmission) than the baseline model. The significantly reduced neural activity in MCC leads to inherently fast learning and resilience against sudden neural damage. This remarkable performance in pilot experiments demonstrates the embodied neuromorphic intelligence of our proposed cooperative L5PC that receives input from diverse neighbouring neurons as context to amplify the transmission of most salient and relevant information for onward transmission, from overwhelmingly large multimodal information utilised at the early stages of on-chip training. Our proposed approach opens new cross-disciplinary avenues for future on-chip DNN training implementations and posits a radical shift in current neuromorphic computing paradigms.

The precise timing of spikes emitted by neurons plays a crucial role in shaping the response of efferent biological neurons. This temporal dimension of neural activity holds significant importance in understanding information processing in neurobiology, especially for the performance of neuromorphic hardware, such as event-based cameras. Nonetheless, many artificial neural models disregard this critical temporal dimension of neural activity. In this study, we present a model designed to efficiently detect temporal spiking motifs using a layer of spiking neurons equipped with heterogeneous synaptic delays. Our model capitalizes on the diverse synaptic delays present on the dendritic tree, enabling specific arrangements of temporally precise synaptic inputs to synchronize upon reaching the basal dendritic tree. We formalize this process as a time-invariant logistic regression, which can be trained using labeled data. To demonstrate its practical efficacy, we apply the model to naturalistic videos transformed into event streams, simulating the output of the biological retina or event-based cameras. To evaluate the robustness of the model in detecting visual motion, we conduct experiments by selectively pruning weights and demonstrate that the model remains efficient even under significantly reduced workloads. In conclusion, by providing a comprehensive, event-driven computational building block, the incorporation of heterogeneous delays has the potential to greatly improve the performance of future spiking neural network algorithms, particularly in the context of neuromorphic chips.

Autonomous edge computing in robotics, smart cities, and autonomous vehicles relies on the seamless integration of sensing, processing, and actuation for real-time decision-making in dynamic environments. At its core is the sensing-to-action loop, which iteratively aligns sensor inputs with computational models to drive adaptive control strategies. These loops can adapt to hyper-local conditions, enhancing resource efficiency and responsiveness, but also face challenges such as resource constraints, synchronization delays in multi-modal data fusion, and the risk of cascading errors in feedback loops. This article explores how proactive, context-aware sensing-to-action and action-to-sensing adaptations can enhance efficiency by dynamically adjusting sensing and computation based on task demands, such as sensing a very limited part of the environment and predicting the rest. By guiding sensing through control actions, action-to-sensing pathways can improve task relevance and resource use, but they also require robust monitoring to prevent cascading errors and maintain reliability. Multi-agent sensing-action loops further extend these capabilities through coordinated sensing and actions across distributed agents, optimizing resource use via collaboration. Additionally, neuromorphic computing, inspired by biological systems, provides an efficient framework for spike-based, event-driven processing that conserves energy, reduces latency, and supports hierarchical control--making it ideal for multi-agent optimization. This article highlights the importance of end-to-end co-design strategies that align algorithmic models with hardware and environmental dynamics and improve cross-layer interdependencies to improve throughput, precision, and adaptability for energy-efficient edge autonomy in complex environments.

The human brain is a complex spiking neural network (SNN) that learns multimodal signals in a zero-shot manner by generalizing existing knowledge. Remarkably, the brain achieves this with minimal power consumption, using event-based signals that propagate within its structure. However, mimicking the human brain in neuromorphic hardware presents both hardware and software challenges. Hardware limitations, such as the slowdown of Moore's law and the von Neumann bottleneck, hinder the efficiency of digital computers. On the software side, SNNs are known for their difficult training, especially when learning multimodal signals. To overcome these challenges, we propose a hardware-software co-design that combines a fixed and random liquid state machine (LSM) SNN encoder with trainable artificial neural network (ANN) projections. The LSM is physically implemented using analogue resistive memory, leveraging the inherent stochasticity of resistive switching to generate random weights. This highly efficient and nanoscale in-memory computing approach effectively addresses the von Neumann bottleneck and the slowdown of Moore's law. The ANN projections are implemented digitally, allowing for easy optimization using contrastive loss, which helps to overcome the difficulties associated with SNN training. We experimentally implement this co-design on a 40nm 256Kb in-memory computing macro. We first demonstrate LSM-based event encoding through supervised classification and linear probing on the N-MNIST and N-TIDIGITS datasets.

Unsupervised feature extraction algorithms form one of the most important building blocks in machine learning systems. These algorithms are often adapted to the event-based domain to perform online learning in neuromorphic hardware. However, not designed for the purpose, such algorithms typically require significant simplification during implementation to meet hardware constraints, creating trade offs with performance. Furthermore, conventional feature extraction algorithms are not designed to generate useful intermediary signals which are valuable only in the context of neuromorphic hardware limitations. In this work a novel event-based feature extraction method is proposed that focuses on these issues. The algorithm operates via simple adaptive selection thresholds which allow a simpler implementation of network homeostasis than previous works by trading off a small amount of information loss in the form of missed events that fall outside the selection thresholds. The behavior of the selection thresholds and the output of the network as a whole are shown to provide uniquely useful signals indicating network weight convergence without the need to access network weights. A novel heuristic method for network size selection is proposed which makes use of noise events and their feature representations. The use of selection thresholds is shown to produce network activation patterns that predict classification accuracy allowing rapid evaluation and optimization of system parameters without the need to run back-end classifiers. The feature extraction method is tested on both the N-MNIST benchmarking dataset and a dataset of airplanes passing through the field of view. Multiple configurations with different classifiers are tested with the results quantifying the resultant performance gains at each processing stage.

In robotics, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are increasingly recognized for their largely-unrealized potential energy efficiency and low latency particularly when implemented on neuromorphic hardware. Our paper highlights three advancements for SNNs in Visual Place Recognition (VPR). First, we propose Modular SNNs, where each SNN represents a set of non-overlapping geographically distinct places, enabling scalable networks for large environments. Secondly, we present Ensembles of Modular SNNs, where multiple networks represent the same place, significantly enhancing accuracy compared to single-network models. Our SNNs are compact and small, comprising only 1500 neurons and 474k synapses, which makes them ideally suited for ensembling due to this small size. Lastly, we investigate the role of sequence matching in SNN-based VPR, a technique where consecutive images are used to refine place recognition. We analyze the responsiveness of SNNs to ensembling and sequence matching compared to other VPR techniques. Our contributions highlight the viability of SNNs for VPR, offering scalable and robust solutions, paving the way for their application in various energy-sensitive robotic tasks.

Event camera, a novel bio-inspired vision sensor, has drawn a lot of attention for its low latency, low power consumption, and high dynamic range. Currently, overfitting remains a critical problem in event-based classification tasks for Spiking Neural Network (SNN) due to its relatively weak spatial representation capability. Data augmentation is a simple but efficient method to alleviate overfitting and improve the generalization ability of neural networks, and saliency-based augmentation methods are proven to be effective in the image processing field. However, there is no approach available for extracting saliency maps from SNNs. Therefore, for the first time, we present Spiking Layer-Time-wise Relevance Propagation rule (SLTRP) and Spiking Layer-wise Relevance Propagation rule (SLRP) in order for SNN to generate stable and accurate CAMs and saliency maps. Based on this, we propose EventRPG, which leverages relevance propagation on the spiking neural network for more efficient augmentation. Our proposed method has been evaluated on several SNN structures, achieving state-of-the-art performance in object recognition tasks including N-Caltech101, CIFAR10-DVS, with accuracies of 85.62% and 85.55%, as well as action recognition task SL-Animals with an accuracy of 91.59%. Our code is available at https://github.com/myuansun/EventRPG.

We introduce NeuroSA, a neuromorphic architecture specifically designed to ensure asymptotic convergence to the ground state of an Ising problem using an annealing process that is governed by the physics of quantum mechanical tunneling using Fowler-Nordheim (FN). The core component of NeuroSA consists of a pair of asynchronous ON-OFF neurons, which effectively map classical simulated annealing (SA) dynamics onto a network of integrate-and-fire (IF) neurons. The threshold of each ON-OFF neuron pair is adaptively adjusted by an FN annealer which replicates the optimal escape mechanism and convergence of SA, particularly at low temperatures. To validate the effectiveness of our neuromorphic Ising machine, we systematically solved various benchmark MAX-CUT combinatorial optimization problems. Across multiple runs, NeuroSA consistently generates solutions that approach the state-of-the-art level with high accuracy (greater than 99%), and without any graph-specific hyperparameter tuning. For practical illustration, we present results from an implementation of NeuroSA on the SpiNNaker2 platform, highlighting the feasibility of mapping our proposed architecture onto a standard neuromorphic accelerator platform.

Compared to frame-based methods, computational neuromorphic imaging using event cameras offers significant advantages, such as minimal motion blur, enhanced temporal resolution, and high dynamic range. The multi-view consistency of Neural Radiance Fields combined with the unique benefits of event cameras, has spurred recent research into reconstructing NeRF from data captured by moving event cameras. While showing impressive performance, existing methods rely on ideal conditions with the availability of uniform and high-quality event sequences and accurate camera poses, and mainly focus on the object level reconstruction, thus limiting their practical applications. In this work, we propose AE-NeRF to address the challenges of learning event-based NeRF from non-ideal conditions, including non-uniform event sequences, noisy poses, and various scales of scenes. Our method exploits the density of event streams and jointly learn a pose correction module with an event-based NeRF (e-NeRF) framework for robust 3D reconstruction from inaccurate camera poses. To generalize to larger scenes, we propose hierarchical event distillation with a proposal e-NeRF network and a vanilla e-NeRF network to resample and refine the reconstruction process. We further propose an event reconstruction loss and a temporal loss to improve the view consistency of the reconstructed scene. We established a comprehensive benchmark that includes large-scale scenes to simulate practical non-ideal conditions, incorporating both synthetic and challenging real-world event datasets. The experimental results show that our method achieves a new state-of-the-art in event-based 3D reconstruction.

Spiking Neural networks (SNN) have emerged as an attractive spatio-temporal computing paradigm for a wide range of low-power vision tasks. However, state-of-the-art (SOTA) SNN models either incur multiple time steps which hinder their deployment in real-time use cases or increase the training complexity significantly. To mitigate this concern, we present a training framework (from scratch) for one-time-step SNNs that uses a novel variant of the recently proposed Hoyer regularizer. We estimate the threshold of each SNN layer as the Hoyer extremum of a clipped version of its activation map, where the clipping threshold is trained using gradient descent with our Hoyer regularizer. This approach not only downscales the value of the trainable threshold, thereby emitting a large number of spikes for weight update with a limited number of iterations (due to only one time step) but also shifts the membrane potential values away from the threshold, thereby mitigating the effect of noise that can degrade the SNN accuracy. Our approach outperforms existing spiking, binary, and adder neural networks in terms of the accuracy-FLOPs trade-off for complex image recognition tasks. Downstream experiments on object detection also demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs), a variant of artificial neural networks (ANNs) with the benefit of energy efficiency, have achieved the accuracy close to its ANN counterparts, on benchmark datasets such as CIFAR10/100 and ImageNet. However, comparing with frame-based input (e.g., images), event-based inputs from e.g., Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) can make a better use of SNNs thanks to the SNNs' asynchronous working mechanism. In this paper, we strengthen the marriage between SNNs and event-based inputs with a proposal to consider anytime optimal inference SNNs, or AOI-SNNs, which can terminate anytime during the inference to achieve optimal inference result. Two novel optimisation techniques are presented to achieve AOI-SNNs: a regularisation and a cutoff. The regularisation enables the training and construction of SNNs with optimised performance, and the cutoff technique optimises the inference of SNNs on event-driven inputs. We conduct an extensive set of experiments on multiple benchmark event-based datasets, including CIFAR10-DVS, N-Caltech101 and DVS128 Gesture. The experimental results demonstrate that our techniques are superior to the state-of-the-art with respect to the accuracy and latency.

This paper presents a novel fusion of low-level approaches for dimensionality reduction into an effective approach for high-level objects in neuromorphic camera data called Inceptive Event Time-Surfaces (IETS). IETSs overcome several limitations of conventional time-surfaces by increasing robustness to noise, promoting spatial consistency, and improving the temporal localization of (moving) edges. Combining IETS with transfer learning improves state-of-the-art performance on the challenging problem of object classification utilizing event camera data.

Autonomous driving demands an integrated approach that encompasses perception, prediction, and planning, all while operating under strict energy constraints to enhance scalability and environmental sustainability. We present Spiking Autonomous Driving (SAD), the first unified Spiking Neural Network (SNN) to address the energy challenges faced by autonomous driving systems through its event-driven and energy-efficient nature. SAD is trained end-to-end and consists of three main modules: perception, which processes inputs from multi-view cameras to construct a spatiotemporal bird's eye view; prediction, which utilizes a novel dual-pathway with spiking neurons to forecast future states; and planning, which generates safe trajectories considering predicted occupancy, traffic rules, and ride comfort. Evaluated on the nuScenes dataset, SAD achieves competitive performance in perception, prediction, and planning tasks, while drawing upon the energy efficiency of SNNs. This work highlights the potential of neuromorphic computing to be applied to energy-efficient autonomous driving, a critical step toward sustainable and safety-critical automotive technology. Our code is available at https://github.com/ridgerchu/SAD.

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has shifted from static, data-driven models to dynamic systems capable of perceiving and interacting with real-world environments. Despite advancements in pattern recognition and symbolic reasoning, current AI systems, such as large language models, remain disembodied, unable to physically engage with the world. This limitation has driven the rise of embodied AI, where autonomous agents, such as humanoid robots, must navigate and manipulate unstructured environments with human-like adaptability. At the core of this challenge lies the concept of Neural Brain, a central intelligence system designed to drive embodied agents with human-like adaptability. A Neural Brain must seamlessly integrate multimodal sensing and perception with cognitive capabilities. Achieving this also requires an adaptive memory system and energy-efficient hardware-software co-design, enabling real-time action in dynamic environments. This paper introduces a unified framework for the Neural Brain of embodied agents, addressing two fundamental challenges: (1) defining the core components of Neural Brain and (2) bridging the gap between static AI models and the dynamic adaptability required for real-world deployment. To this end, we propose a biologically inspired architecture that integrates multimodal active sensing, perception-cognition-action function, neuroplasticity-based memory storage and updating, and neuromorphic hardware/software optimization. Furthermore, we also review the latest research on embodied agents across these four aspects and analyze the gap between current AI systems and human intelligence. By synthesizing insights from neuroscience, we outline a roadmap towards the development of generalizable, autonomous agents capable of human-level intelligence in real-world scenarios.

Conventional semiconductor-based integrated circuits are gradually approaching fundamental scaling limits. Many prospective solutions have recently emerged to supplement or replace both the technology on which basic devices are built and the architecture of data processing. Neuromorphic circuits are a promising approach to computing where techniques used by the brain to achieve high efficiency are exploited. Many existing neuromorphic circuits rely on unconventional and useful properties of novel technologies to better mimic the operation of the brain. One such technology is single flux quantum (SFQ) logic -- a cryogenic superconductive technology in which the data are represented by quanta of magnetic flux (fluxons) produced and processed by Josephson junctions embedded within inductive loops. The movement of a fluxon within a circuit produces a quantized voltage pulse (SFQ pulse), resembling a neuronal spiking event. These circuits routinely operate at clock frequencies of tens to hundreds of gigahertz, making SFQ a natural technology for processing high frequency pulse trains. Prior proposals for SFQ neural networks often require energy-expensive fluxon conversions, involve heterogeneous technologies, or exclusively focus on device level behavior. In this paper, a design methodology for deep single flux quantum neuromorphic networks is presented. Synaptic and neuronal circuits based on SFQ technology are presented and characterized. Based on these primitives, a deep neuromorphic XOR network is evaluated as a case study, both at the architectural and circuit levels, achieving wide classification margins. The proposed methodology does not employ unconventional superconductive devices or semiconductor transistors. The resulting networks are tunable by an external current, making this proposed system an effective approach for scalable cryogenic neuromorphic computing.

This study introduces BrainTransformers, an innovative Large Language Model (LLM) implemented using Spiking Neural Networks (SNN). Our key contributions include: (1) designing SNN-compatible Transformer components such as SNNMatmul, SNNSoftmax, and SNNSiLU; (2) implementing an SNN approximation of the SiLU activation function; and (3) developing a Synapsis module to simulate synaptic plasticity. Our 3-billion parameter model, BrainTransformers-3B-Chat, demonstrates competitive performance across various benchmarks, including MMLU (63.2), BBH (54.1), ARC-C (54.3), and GSM8K (76.3), while potentially offering improved energy efficiency and biological plausibility. The model employs a three-stage training approach, including SNN-specific neuronal synaptic plasticity training. This research opens new avenues for brain-like AI systems in natural language processing and neuromorphic computing. Future work will focus on hardware optimization, developing specialized SNN fine-tuning tools, and exploring practical applications in energy-efficient computing environments.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are promising energy-efficient models for neuromorphic computing. For training the non-differentiable SNN models, the backpropagation through time (BPTT) with surrogate gradients (SG) method has achieved high performance. However, this method suffers from considerable memory cost and training time during training. In this paper, we propose the Spatial Learning Through Time (SLTT) method that can achieve high performance while greatly improving training efficiency compared with BPTT. First, we show that the backpropagation of SNNs through the temporal domain contributes just a little to the final calculated gradients. Thus, we propose to ignore the unimportant routes in the computational graph during backpropagation. The proposed method reduces the number of scalar multiplications and achieves a small memory occupation that is independent of the total time steps. Furthermore, we propose a variant of SLTT, called SLTT-K, that allows backpropagation only at K time steps, then the required number of scalar multiplications is further reduced and is independent of the total time steps. Experiments on both static and neuromorphic datasets demonstrate superior training efficiency and performance of our SLTT. In particular, our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on ImageNet, while the memory cost and training time are reduced by more than 70% and 50%, respectively, compared with BPTT.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer both compelling potential advantages, including energy efficiency and low latencies and challenges including the non-differentiable nature of event spikes. Much of the initial research in this area has converted deep neural networks to equivalent SNNs, but this conversion approach potentially negates some of the advantages of SNN-based approaches developed from scratch. One promising area for high-performance SNNs is template matching and image recognition. This research introduces the first high-performance SNN for the Visual Place Recognition (VPR) task: given a query image, the SNN has to find the closest match out of a list of reference images. At the core of this new system is a novel assignment scheme that implements a form of ambiguity-informed salience, by up-weighting single-place-encoding neurons and down-weighting "ambiguous" neurons that respond to multiple different reference places. In a range of experiments on the challenging Nordland, Oxford RobotCar, SPEDTest, Synthia, and St Lucia datasets, we show that our SNN achieves comparable VPR performance to state-of-the-art and classical techniques, and degrades gracefully in performance with an increasing number of reference places. Our results provide a significant milestone towards SNNs that can provide robust, energy-efficient, and low latency robot localization.

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that respond to local changes in light intensity and feature low latency, high energy efficiency, and high dynamic range. Meanwhile, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have gained significant attention due to their remarkable efficiency and fault tolerance. By synergistically harnessing the energy efficiency inherent in event cameras and the spike-based processing capabilities of SNNs, their integration could enable ultra-low-power application scenarios, such as action recognition tasks. However, existing approaches often entail converting asynchronous events into conventional frames, leading to additional data mapping efforts and a loss of sparsity, contradicting the design concept of SNNs and event cameras. To address this challenge, we propose SpikePoint, a novel end-to-end point-based SNN architecture. SpikePoint excels at processing sparse event cloud data, effectively extracting both global and local features through a singular-stage structure. Leveraging the surrogate training method, SpikePoint achieves high accuracy with few parameters and maintains low power consumption, specifically employing the identity mapping feature extractor on diverse datasets. SpikePoint achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on four event-based action recognition datasets using only 16 timesteps, surpassing other SNN methods. Moreover, it also achieves SOTA performance across all methods on three datasets, utilizing approximately 0.3\% of the parameters and 0.5\% of power consumption employed by artificial neural networks (ANNs). These results emphasize the significance of Point Cloud and pave the way for many ultra-low-power event-based data processing applications.

Both biological and artificial neural networks inherently balance their performance with their operational cost, which balances their computational abilities. Typically, an efficient neuromorphic neural network is one that learns representations that reduce the redundancies and dimensionality of its input. This is for instance achieved in sparse coding, and sparse representations derived from natural images yield representations that are heterogeneous, both in their sampling of input features and in the variance of those features. Here, we investigated the connection between natural images' structure, particularly oriented features, and their corresponding sparse codes. We showed that representations of input features scattered across multiple levels of variance substantially improve the sparseness and resilience of sparse codes, at the cost of reconstruction performance. This echoes the structure of the model's input, allowing to account for the heterogeneously aleatoric structures of natural images. We demonstrate that learning kernel from natural images produces heterogeneity by balancing between approximate and dense representations, which improves all reconstruction metrics. Using a parametrized control of the kernels' heterogeneity used by a convolutional sparse coding algorithm, we show that heterogeneity emphasizes sparseness, while homogeneity improves representation granularity. In a broader context, these encoding strategy can serve as inputs to deep convolutional neural networks. We prove that such variance-encoded sparse image datasets enhance computational efficiency, emphasizing the benefits of kernel heterogeneity to leverage naturalistic and variant input structures and possible applications to improve the throughput of neuromorphic hardware.

The estimation of optical flow and 6-DoF ego-motion, two fundamental tasks in 3D vision, has typically been addressed independently. For neuromorphic vision (e.g., event cameras), however, the lack of robust data association makes solving the two problems separately an ill-posed challenge, especially in the absence of supervision via ground truth. Existing works mitigate this ill-posedness by either enforcing the smoothness of the flow field via an explicit variational regularizer or leveraging explicit structure-and-motion priors in the parametrization to improve event alignment. The former notably introduces bias in results and computational overhead, while the latter, which parametrizes the optical flow in terms of the scene depth and the camera motion, often converges to suboptimal local minima. To address these issues, we propose an unsupervised framework that jointly optimizes egomotion and optical flow via implicit spatial-temporal and geometric regularization. First, by modeling camera's egomotion as a continuous spline and optical flow as an implicit neural representation, our method inherently embeds spatial-temporal coherence through inductive biases. Second, we incorporate structure-and-motion priors through differential geometric constraints, bypassing explicit depth estimation while maintaining rigorous geometric consistency. As a result, our framework (called E-MoFlow) unifies egomotion and optical flow estimation via implicit regularization under a fully unsupervised paradigm. Experiments demonstrate its versatility to general 6-DoF motion scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art performance among unsupervised methods and competitive even with supervised approaches.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) are a class of bio-inspired neural networks that promise to bring low-power and low-latency inference to edge devices through asynchronous and sparse processing. However, being temporal models, SNNs depend heavily on expressive states to generate predictions on par with classical artificial neural networks (ANNs). These states converge only after long transient periods, and quickly decay without input data, leading to higher latency, power consumption, and lower accuracy. This work addresses this issue by initializing the state with an auxiliary ANN running at a low rate. The SNN then uses the state to generate predictions with high temporal resolution until the next initialization phase. Our hybrid ANN-SNN model thus combines the best of both worlds: It does not suffer from long state transients and state decay thanks to the ANN, and can generate predictions with high temporal resolution, low latency, and low power thanks to the SNN. We show for the task of event-based 2D and 3D human pose estimation that our method consumes 88% less power with only a 4% decrease in performance compared to its fully ANN counterparts when run at the same inference rate. Moreover, when compared to SNNs, our method achieves a 74% lower error. This research thus provides a new understanding of how ANNs and SNNs can be used to maximize their respective benefits.

Bionic vision uses neuroprostheses to restore useful vision to people living with incurable blindness. However, a major outstanding challenge is predicting what people 'see' when they use their devices. The limited field of view of current devices necessitates head movements to scan the scene, which is difficult to simulate on a computer screen. In addition, many computational models of bionic vision lack biological realism. To address these challenges, we present VR-SPV, an open-source virtual reality toolbox for simulated prosthetic vision that uses a psychophysically validated computational model to allow sighted participants to 'see through the eyes' of a bionic eye user. To demonstrate its utility, we systematically evaluated how clinically reported visual distortions affect performance in a letter recognition and an immersive obstacle avoidance task. Our results highlight the importance of using an appropriate phosphene model when predicting visual outcomes for bionic vision.

The success of deep learning is frequently described as the ability to train all parameters of a network on a specific application in an end-to-end fashion. Yet, several design choices on the camera level, including the pixel layout of the sensor, are considered as pre-defined and fixed, and high resolution, regular pixel layouts are considered to be the most generic ones in computer vision and graphics, treating all regions of an image as equally important. While several works have considered non-uniform, \eg, hexagonal or foveated, pixel layouts in hardware and image processing, the layout has not been integrated into the end-to-end learning paradigm so far. In this work, we present the first truly end-to-end trained imaging pipeline that optimizes the size and distribution of pixels on the imaging sensor jointly with the parameters of a given neural network on a specific task. We derive an analytic, differentiable approach for the sensor layout parameterization that allows for task-specific, local varying pixel resolutions. We present two pixel layout parameterization functions: rectangular and curvilinear grid shapes that retain a regular topology. We provide a drop-in module that approximates sensor simulation given existing high-resolution images to directly connect our method with existing deep learning models. We show that network predictions benefit from learnable pixel layouts for two different downstream tasks, classification and semantic segmentation.

Reinforcement learning agents based on Transformer architectures have achieved impressive performance on sequential decision-making tasks, but their reliance on dense matrix operations makes them ill-suited for energy-constrained, edge-oriented platforms. Spiking neural networks promise ultra-low-power, event-driven inference, yet no prior work has seamlessly merged spiking dynamics with return-conditioned sequence modeling. We present the Spiking Decision Transformer (SNN-DT), which embeds Leaky Integrate-and-Fire neurons into each self-attention block, trains end-to-end via surrogate gradients, and incorporates biologically inspired three-factor plasticity, phase-shifted spike-based positional encodings, and a lightweight dendritic routing module. Our implementation matches or exceeds standard Decision Transformer performance on classic control benchmarks (CartPole-v1, MountainCar-v0, Acrobot-v1, Pendulum-v1) while emitting fewer than ten spikes per decision, an energy proxy suggesting over four orders-of-magnitude reduction in per inference energy. By marrying sequence modeling with neuromorphic efficiency, SNN-DT opens a pathway toward real-time, low-power control on embedded and wearable devices.

Why do neurons communicate through spikes? By definition, spikes are all-or-none neural events which occur at continuous times. In other words, spikes are on one side binary, existing or not without further details, and on the other can occur at any asynchronous time, without the need for a centralized clock. This stands in stark contrast to the analog representation of values and the discretized timing classically used in digital processing and at the base of modern-day neural networks. As neural systems almost systematically use this so-called event-based representation in the living world, a better understanding of this phenomenon remains a fundamental challenge in neurobiology in order to better interpret the profusion of recorded data. With the growing need for intelligent embedded systems, it also emerges as a new computing paradigm to enable the efficient operation of a new class of sensors and event-based computers, called neuromorphic, which could enable significant gains in computation time and energy consumption -- a major societal issue in the era of the digital economy and global warming. In this review paper, we provide evidence from biology, theory and engineering that the precise timing of spikes plays a crucial role in our understanding of the efficiency of neural networks.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have shown their competence in handling spatial-temporal event-based data with low energy consumption. Similar to conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs), SNNs are also vulnerable to gradient-based adversarial attacks, wherein gradients are calculated by spatial-temporal back-propagation (STBP) and surrogate gradients (SGs). However, the SGs may be invisible for an inference-only model as they do not influence the inference results, and current gradient-based attacks are ineffective for binary dynamic images captured by the dynamic vision sensor (DVS). While some approaches addressed the issue of invisible SGs through universal SGs, their SGs lack a correlation with the victim model, resulting in sub-optimal performance. Moreover, the imperceptibility of existing SNN-based binary attacks is still insufficient. In this paper, we introduce an innovative potential-dependent surrogate gradient (PDSG) method to establish a robust connection between the SG and the model, thereby enhancing the adaptability of adversarial attacks across various models with invisible SGs. Additionally, we propose the sparse dynamic attack (SDA) to effectively attack binary dynamic images. Utilizing a generation-reduction paradigm, SDA can fully optimize the sparsity of adversarial perturbations. Experimental results demonstrate that our PDSG and SDA outperform state-of-the-art SNN-based attacks across various models and datasets. Specifically, our PDSG achieves 100% attack success rate on ImageNet, and our SDA obtains 82% attack success rate by modifying only 0.24% of the pixels on CIFAR10DVS. The code is available at https://github.com/ryime/PDSG-SDA .

Artificial Neural Networks are computational network models inspired by signal processing in the brain. These models have dramatically improved the performance of many learning tasks, including speech and object recognition. However, today's computing hardware is inefficient at implementing neural networks, in large part because much of it was designed for von Neumann computing schemes. Significant effort has been made to develop electronic architectures tuned to implement artificial neural networks that improve upon both computational speed and energy efficiency. Here, we propose a new architecture for a fully-optical neural network that, using unique advantages of optics, promises a computational speed enhancement of at least two orders of magnitude over the state-of-the-art and three orders of magnitude in power efficiency for conventional learning tasks. We experimentally demonstrate essential parts of our architecture using a programmable nanophotonic processor.

Machine learning is playing an increasingly significant role in emerging mobile application domains such as AR/VR, ADAS, etc. Accordingly, hardware architects have designed customized hardware for machine learning algorithms, especially neural networks, to improve compute efficiency. However, machine learning is typically just one processing stage in complex end-to-end applications, involving multiple components in a mobile Systems-on-a-chip (SoC). Focusing only on ML accelerators loses bigger optimization opportunity at the system (SoC) level. This paper argues that hardware architects should expand the optimization scope to the entire SoC. We demonstrate one particular case-study in the domain of continuous computer vision where camera sensor, image signal processor (ISP), memory, and NN accelerator are synergistically co-designed to achieve optimal system-level efficiency.

The field of artificial intelligence has seen explosive growth and exponential success. The last phase of development showcased deep learnings ability to solve a variety of difficult problems across a multitude of domains. Many of these networks met and exceeded human benchmarks by becoming experts in the domains in which they are trained. Though the successes of artificial intelligence have begun to overshadow its failures, there is still much that separates current artificial intelligence tools from becoming the exceptional general learners that humans are. In this paper, we identify the ten commandments upon which human intelligence is systematically and hierarchically built. We believe these commandments work collectively to serve as the essential ingredients that lead to the emergence of higher-order cognition and intelligence. This paper discusses a computational framework that could house these ten commandments and suggests new architectural modifications that could lead to the development of smarter, more explainable, and generalizable artificial systems inspired by a neuromorphic approach.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are brain-inspired energy-efficient models that encode information in spatiotemporal dynamics. Recently, deep SNNs trained directly have shown great success in achieving high performance on classification tasks with very few time steps. However, how to design a directly-trained SNN for the regression task of object detection still remains a challenging problem. To address this problem, we propose EMS-YOLO, a novel directly-trained SNN framework for object detection, which is the first trial to train a deep SNN with surrogate gradients for object detection rather than ANN-SNN conversion strategies. Specifically, we design a full-spike residual block, EMS-ResNet, which can effectively extend the depth of the directly-trained SNN with low power consumption. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze and prove the EMS-ResNet could avoid gradient vanishing or exploding. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art ANN-SNN conversion methods (at least 500 time steps) in extremely fewer time steps (only 4 time steps). It is shown that our model could achieve comparable performance to the ANN with the same architecture while consuming 5.83 times less energy on the frame-based COCO Dataset and the event-based Gen1 Dataset.

The brain has computational capabilities that surpass those of modern systems, being able to solve complex problems efficiently in a simple way. Neuromorphic engineering aims to mimic biology in order to develop new systems capable of incorporating such capabilities. Bio-inspired learning systems continue to be a challenge that must be solved, and much work needs to be done in this regard. Among all brain regions, the hippocampus stands out as an autoassociative short-term memory with the capacity to learn and recall memories from any fragment of them. These characteristics make the hippocampus an ideal candidate for developing bio-inspired learning systems that, in addition, resemble content-addressable memories. Therefore, in this work we propose a bio-inspired spiking content-addressable memory model based on the CA3 region of the hippocampus with the ability to learn, forget and recall memories, both orthogonal and non-orthogonal, from any fragment of them. The model was implemented on the SpiNNaker hardware platform using Spiking Neural Networks. A set of experiments based on functional, stress and applicability tests were performed to demonstrate its correct functioning. This work presents the first hardware implementation of a fully-functional bio-inspired spiking hippocampal content-addressable memory model, paving the way for the development of future more complex neuromorphic systems.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) provide an energy-efficient way to extract 3D spatio-temporal features. Point clouds are sparse 3D spatial data, which suggests that SNNs should be well-suited for processing them. However, when applying SNNs to point clouds, they often exhibit limited performance and fewer application scenarios. We attribute this to inappropriate preprocessing and feature extraction methods. To address this issue, we first introduce the Spike Voxel Coding (SVC) scheme, which encodes the 3D point clouds into a sparse spike train space, reducing the storage requirements and saving time on point cloud preprocessing. Then, we propose a Spike Sparse Convolution (SSC) model for efficiently extracting 3D sparse point cloud features. Combining SVC and SSC, we design an efficient 3D SNN backbone (E-3DSNN), which is friendly with neuromorphic hardware. For instance, SSC can be implemented on neuromorphic chips with only minor modifications to the addressing function of vanilla spike convolution. Experiments on ModelNet40, KITTI, and Semantic KITTI datasets demonstrate that E-3DSNN achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results with remarkable efficiency. Notably, our E-3DSNN (1.87M) obtained 91.7\% top-1 accuracy on ModelNet40, surpassing the current best SNN baselines (14.3M) by 3.0\%. To our best knowledge, it is the first direct training 3D SNN backbone that can simultaneously handle various 3D computer vision tasks (e.g., classification, detection, and segmentation) with an event-driven nature. Code is available: https://github.com/bollossom/E-3DSNN/.

The field of neuromorphic computing holds great promise in terms of advancing computing efficiency and capabilities by following brain-inspired principles. However, the rich diversity of techniques employed in neuromorphic research has resulted in a lack of clear standards for benchmarking, hindering effective evaluation of the advantages and strengths of neuromorphic methods compared to traditional deep-learning-based methods. This paper presents a collaborative effort, bringing together members from academia and the industry, to define benchmarks for neuromorphic computing: NeuroBench. The goals of NeuroBench are to be a collaborative, fair, and representative benchmark suite developed by the community, for the community. In this paper, we discuss the challenges associated with benchmarking neuromorphic solutions, and outline the key features of NeuroBench. We believe that NeuroBench will be a significant step towards defining standards that can unify the goals of neuromorphic computing and drive its technological progress. Please visit neurobench.ai for the latest updates on the benchmark tasks and metrics.

Spiking Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as an energy-efficient alternative to conventional LLMs through their event-driven computation. To effectively obtain spiking LLMs, researchers develop different ANN-to-SNN conversion methods by leveraging pre-trained ANN parameters while inheriting the energy efficiency of SNN. However, existing conversion methods struggle with extreme activation outliers and incompatible nonlinear operations of ANN-based LLMs. To address this, we propose a loss-less ANN-SNN conversion for fully spike-driven LLMs, termed LAS. Specifically, LAS introduces two novel neurons to convert the activation outlier and nonlinear operation of ANN-based LLMs. Moreover, LAS tailors the spike-equivalent Transformer components for spiking LLMs, which can ensure full spiking conversion without any loss of performance. Experimental results on six language models and two vision-language models demonstrate that LAS achieves loss-less conversion. Notably, on OPT-66B, LAS even improves the accuracy of 2\% on the WSC task. In addition, the parameter and ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of LAS. The source code is available at https://github.com/lc783/LAS

In this paper, we describe a design of a mixed signal circuit for a binary neuron (a.k.a perceptron, threshold logic gate) and a methodology for automatically embedding such cells in ASICs. The binary neuron, referred to as an FTL (flash threshold logic) uses floating gate or flash transistors whose threshold voltages serve as a proxy for the weights of the neuron. Algorithms for mapping the weights to the flash transistor threshold voltages are presented. The threshold voltages are determined to maximize both the robustness of the cell and its speed. The performance, power, and area of a single FTL cell are shown to be significantly smaller (79.4%), consume less power (61.6%), and operate faster (40.3%) compared to conventional CMOS logic equivalents. Also included are the architecture and the algorithms to program the flash devices of an FTL. The FTL cells are implemented as standard cells, and are designed to allow commercial synthesis and P&R tools to automatically use them in synthesis of ASICs. Substantial reductions in area and power without sacrificing performance are demonstrated on several ASIC benchmarks by the automatic embedding of FTL cells. The paper also demonstrates how FTL cells can be used for fixing timing errors after fabrication.

Recent progress on Transformers and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) models provide new network architectural designs for computer vision tasks. Although these models proved to be effective in many vision tasks such as image recognition, there remain challenges in adapting them for low-level vision. The inflexibility to support high-resolution images and limitations of local attention are perhaps the main bottlenecks. In this work, we present a multi-axis MLP based architecture called MAXIM, that can serve as an efficient and flexible general-purpose vision backbone for image processing tasks. MAXIM uses a UNet-shaped hierarchical structure and supports long-range interactions enabled by spatially-gated MLPs. Specifically, MAXIM contains two MLP-based building blocks: a multi-axis gated MLP that allows for efficient and scalable spatial mixing of local and global visual cues, and a cross-gating block, an alternative to cross-attention, which accounts for cross-feature conditioning. Both these modules are exclusively based on MLPs, but also benefit from being both global and `fully-convolutional', two properties that are desirable for image processing. Our extensive experimental results show that the proposed MAXIM model achieves state-of-the-art performance on more than ten benchmarks across a range of image processing tasks, including denoising, deblurring, deraining, dehazing, and enhancement while requiring fewer or comparable numbers of parameters and FLOPs than competitive models. The source code and trained models will be available at https://github.com/google-research/maxim.

Recent years have witnessed Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) gaining attention for their ultra-low energy consumption and high biological plausibility compared with traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Despite their distinguished properties, the application of SNNs in the computationally intensive field of image generation is still under exploration. In this paper, we propose the Spiking Diffusion Models (SDMs), an innovative family of SNN-based generative models that excel in producing high-quality samples with significantly reduced energy consumption. In particular, we propose a Temporal-wise Spiking Mechanism (TSM) that allows SNNs to capture more temporal features from a bio-plasticity perspective. In addition, we propose a threshold-guided strategy that can further improve the performances by up to 16.7% without any additional training. We also make the first attempt to use the ANN-SNN approach for SNN-based generation tasks. Extensive experimental results reveal that our approach not only exhibits comparable performance to its ANN counterpart with few spiking time steps, but also outperforms previous SNN-based generative models by a large margin. Moreover, we also demonstrate the high-quality generation ability of SDM on large-scale datasets, e.g., LSUN bedroom. This development marks a pivotal advancement in the capabilities of SNN-based generation, paving the way for future research avenues to realize low-energy and low-latency generative applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/AndyCao1125/SDM.

As one of the energy-efficient alternatives of conventional neural networks (CNNs), spiking neural networks (SNNs) have gained more and more interest recently. To train the deep models, some effective batch normalization (BN) techniques are proposed in SNNs. All these BNs are suggested to be used after the convolution layer as usually doing in CNNs. However, the spiking neuron is much more complex with the spatio-temporal dynamics. The regulated data flow after the BN layer will be disturbed again by the membrane potential updating operation before the firing function, i.e., the nonlinear activation. Therefore, we advocate adding another BN layer before the firing function to normalize the membrane potential again, called MPBN. To eliminate the induced time cost of MPBN, we also propose a training-inference-decoupled re-parameterization technique to fold the trained MPBN into the firing threshold. With the re-parameterization technique, the MPBN will not introduce any extra time burden in the inference. Furthermore, the MPBN can also adopt the element-wised form, while these BNs after the convolution layer can only use the channel-wised form. Experimental results show that the proposed MPBN performs well on both popular non-spiking static and neuromorphic datasets. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/yfguo91/MPBN{MPBN}.

As the size of large language models continue to scale, so does the computational resources required to run it. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as an energy-efficient approach to deep learning that leverage sparse and event-driven activations to reduce the computational overhead associated with model inference. While they have become competitive with non-spiking models on many computer vision tasks, SNNs have also proven to be more challenging to train. As a result, their performance lags behind modern deep learning, and we are yet to see the effectiveness of SNNs in language generation. In this paper, inspired by the Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) language model, we successfully implement `SpikeGPT', a generative language model with binary, event-driven spiking activation units. We train the proposed model on two model variants: 45M and 216M parameters. To the best of our knowledge, SpikeGPT is the largest backpropagation-trained SNN model to date, rendering it suitable for both the generation and comprehension of natural language. We achieve this by modifying the transformer block to replace multi-head self attention to reduce quadratic computational complexity O(N^2) to linear complexity O(N) with increasing sequence length. Input tokens are instead streamed in sequentially to our attention mechanism (as with typical SNNs). Our preliminary experiments show that SpikeGPT remains competitive with non-spiking models on tested benchmarks, while maintaining 20x fewer operations when processed on neuromorphic hardware that can leverage sparse, event-driven activations. Our code implementation is available at https://github.com/ridgerchu/SpikeGPT.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are well known as a promising energy-efficient alternative to conventional artificial neural networks. Subject to the preconceived impression that SNNs are sparse firing, the analysis and optimization of inherent redundancy in SNNs have been largely overlooked, thus the potential advantages of spike-based neuromorphic computing in accuracy and energy efficiency are interfered. In this work, we pose and focus on three key questions regarding the inherent redundancy in SNNs. We argue that the redundancy is induced by the spatio-temporal invariance of SNNs, which enhances the efficiency of parameter utilization but also invites lots of noise spikes. Further, we analyze the effect of spatio-temporal invariance on the spatio-temporal dynamics and spike firing of SNNs. Then, motivated by these analyses, we propose an Advance Spatial Attention (ASA) module to harness SNNs' redundancy, which can adaptively optimize their membrane potential distribution by a pair of individual spatial attention sub-modules. In this way, noise spike features are accurately regulated. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly drop the spike firing with better performance than state-of-the-art SNN baselines. Our code is available in https://github.com/BICLab/ASA-SNN.

This work is dedicated to the review and perspective of the new direction that we call "Neuropunk revolution" resembling the cultural phenomenon of cyberpunk. This new phenomenon has its foundations in advances in neuromorphic technologies including memristive and bio-plausible simulations, BCI, and neurointerfaces as well as unconventional approaches to AI and computing in general. We present the review of the current state-of-the-art and our vision of near future development of scientific approaches and future technologies. We call the "Neuropunk revolution" the set of trends that in our view provide the necessary background for the new generation of approaches technologies to integrate the cybernetic objects with biological tissues in close loop system as well as robotic systems inspired by the biological processes again integrated with biological objects. We see bio-plausible simulations implemented by digital computers or spiking networks memristive hardware as promising bridge or middleware between digital and (neuro)biological domains.

In recent years, generative adversarial networks (GANs) and its variants have achieved unprecedented success in image synthesis. They are widely adopted in synthesizing facial images which brings potential security concerns to humans as the fakes spread and fuel the misinformation. However, robust detectors of these AI-synthesized fake faces are still in their infancy and are not ready to fully tackle this emerging challenge. In this work, we propose a novel approach, named FakeSpotter, based on monitoring neuron behaviors to spot AI-synthesized fake faces. The studies on neuron coverage and interactions have successfully shown that they can be served as testing criteria for deep learning systems, especially under the settings of being exposed to adversarial attacks. Here, we conjecture that monitoring neuron behavior can also serve as an asset in detecting fake faces since layer-by-layer neuron activation patterns may capture more subtle features that are important for the fake detector. Experimental results on detecting four types of fake faces synthesized with the state-of-the-art GANs and evading four perturbation attacks show the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.

In recent computer vision research, the advent of the Vision Transformer (ViT) has rapidly revolutionized various architectural design efforts: ViT achieved state-of-the-art image classification performance using self-attention found in natural language processing, and MLP-Mixer achieved competitive performance using simple multi-layer perceptrons. In contrast, several studies have also suggested that carefully redesigned convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can achieve advanced performance comparable to ViT without resorting to these new ideas. Against this background, there is growing interest in what inductive bias is suitable for computer vision. Here we propose Sequencer, a novel and competitive architecture alternative to ViT that provides a new perspective on these issues. Unlike ViTs, Sequencer models long-range dependencies using LSTMs rather than self-attention layers. We also propose a two-dimensional version of Sequencer module, where an LSTM is decomposed into vertical and horizontal LSTMs to enhance performance. Despite its simplicity, several experiments demonstrate that Sequencer performs impressively well: Sequencer2D-L, with 54M parameters, realizes 84.6% top-1 accuracy on only ImageNet-1K. Not only that, we show that it has good transferability and the robust resolution adaptability on double resolution-band.

This paper presents a new methodology to alleviate the fundamental trade-off between accuracy and latency in spiking neural networks (SNNs). The approach involves decoding confidence information over time from the SNN outputs and using it to develop a decision-making agent that can dynamically determine when to terminate each inference. The proposed method, Dynamic Confidence, provides several significant benefits to SNNs. 1. It can effectively optimize latency dynamically at runtime, setting it apart from many existing low-latency SNN algorithms. Our experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets have demonstrated an average 40% speedup across eight different settings after applying Dynamic Confidence. 2. The decision-making agent in Dynamic Confidence is straightforward to construct and highly robust in parameter space, making it extremely easy to implement. 3. The proposed method enables visualizing the potential of any given SNN, which sets a target for current SNNs to approach. For instance, if an SNN can terminate at the most appropriate time point for each input sample, a ResNet-50 SNN can achieve an accuracy as high as 82.47% on ImageNet within just 4.71 time steps on average. Unlocking the potential of SNNs needs a highly-reliable decision-making agent to be constructed and fed with a high-quality estimation of ground truth. In this regard, Dynamic Confidence represents a meaningful step toward realizing the potential of SNNs.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are known as a typical kind of brain-inspired models with their unique features of rich neuronal dynamics, diverse coding schemes and low power consumption properties. How to obtain a high-accuracy model has always been the main challenge in the field of SNN. Currently, there are two mainstream methods, i.e., obtaining a converted SNN through converting a well-trained Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to its SNN counterpart or training an SNN directly. However, the inference time of a converted SNN is too long, while SNN training is generally very costly and inefficient. In this work, a new SNN training paradigm is proposed by combining the concepts of the two different training methods with the help of the pretrain technique and BP-based deep SNN training mechanism. We believe that the proposed paradigm is a more efficient pipeline for training SNNs. The pipeline includes pipeS for static data transfer tasks and pipeD for dynamic data transfer tasks. SOTA results are obtained in a large-scale event-driven dataset ES-ImageNet. For training acceleration, we achieve the same (or higher) best accuracy as similar LIF-SNNs using 1/10 training time on ImageNet-1K and 2/5 training time on ES-ImageNet and also provide a time-accuracy benchmark for a new dataset ES-UCF101. These experimental results reveal the similarity of the functions of parameters between ANNs and SNNs and also demonstrate the various potential applications of this SNN training pipeline.

Domain shift remains a persistent challenge in deep-learning-based computer vision, often requiring extensive model modifications or large labeled datasets to address. Inspired by human visual perception, which adjusts input quality through corrective lenses rather than over-training the brain, we propose Lens, a novel camera sensor control method that enhances model performance by capturing high-quality images from the model's perspective rather than relying on traditional human-centric sensor control. Lens is lightweight and adapts sensor parameters to specific models and scenes in real-time. At its core, Lens utilizes VisiT, a training-free, model-specific quality indicator that evaluates individual unlabeled samples at test time using confidence scores without additional adaptation costs. To validate Lens, we introduce ImageNet-ES Diverse, a new benchmark dataset capturing natural perturbations from varying sensor and lighting conditions. Extensive experiments on both ImageNet-ES and our new ImageNet-ES Diverse show that Lens significantly improves model accuracy across various baseline schemes for sensor control and model modification while maintaining low latency in image captures. Lens effectively compensates for large model size differences and integrates synergistically with model improvement techniques. Our code and dataset are available at github.com/Edw2n/Lens.git.

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) achieve an impressive performance due to the remarkable representation ability in learning the graph information. However, GCNs, when implemented on a deep network, require expensive computation power, making them difficult to be deployed on battery-powered devices. In contrast, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which perform a bio-fidelity inference process, offer an energy-efficient neural architecture. In this work, we propose SpikingGCN, an end-to-end framework that aims to integrate the embedding of GCNs with the biofidelity characteristics of SNNs. The original graph data are encoded into spike trains based on the incorporation of graph convolution. We further model biological information processing by utilizing a fully connected layer combined with neuron nodes. In a wide range of scenarios (e.g. citation networks, image graph classification, and recommender systems), our experimental results show that the proposed method could gain competitive performance against state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, we show that SpikingGCN on a neuromorphic chip can bring a clear advantage of energy efficiency into graph data analysis, which demonstrates its great potential to construct environment-friendly machine learning models.

This paper presents TULIP, a new architecture for a binary neural network (BNN) that uses an optimal schedule for executing the operations of an arbitrary BNN. It was constructed with the goal of maximizing energy efficiency per classification. At the top-level, TULIP consists of a collection of unique processing elements (TULIP-PEs) that are organized in a SIMD fashion. Each TULIP-PE consists of a small network of binary neurons, and a small amount of local memory per neuron. The unique aspect of the binary neuron is that it is implemented as a mixed-signal circuit that natively performs the inner-product and thresholding operation of an artificial binary neuron. Moreover, the binary neuron, which is implemented as a single CMOS standard cell, is reconfigurable, and with a change in a single parameter, can implement all standard operations involved in a BNN. We present novel algorithms for mapping arbitrary nodes of a BNN onto the TULIP-PEs. TULIP was implemented as an ASIC in TSMC 40nm-LP technology. To provide a fair comparison, a recently reported BNN that employs a conventional MAC-based arithmetic processor was also implemented in the same technology. The results show that TULIP is consistently 3X more energy-efficient than the conventional design, without any penalty in performance, area, or accuracy.

Large-scale Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have significantly advanced with text-aligned vision inputs. They have made remarkable progress in computer vision tasks by aligning text modality with vision inputs. There are also endeavors to incorporate multi-vision sensors beyond RGB, including thermal, depth, and medical X-ray images. However, we observe that current LVLMs view images taken from multi-vision sensors as if they were in the same RGB domain without considering the physical characteristics of multi-vision sensors. They fail to convey the fundamental multi-vision sensor information from the dataset and the corresponding contextual knowledge properly. Consequently, alignment between the information from the actual physical environment and the text is not achieved correctly, making it difficult to answer complex sensor-related questions that consider the physical environment. In this paper, we aim to establish a multi-vision Sensor Perception And Reasoning benchmarK called SPARK that can reduce the fundamental multi-vision sensor information gap between images and multi-vision sensors. We generated 6,248 vision-language test samples automatically to investigate multi-vision sensory perception and multi-vision sensory reasoning on physical sensor knowledge proficiency across different formats, covering different types of sensor-related questions. We utilized these samples to assess ten leading LVLMs. The results showed that most models displayed deficiencies in multi-vision sensory reasoning to varying extents. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/top-yun/SPARK

Multi-Sensor Fusion (MSF) based perception systems have been the foundation in supporting many industrial applications and domains, such as self-driving cars, robotic arms, and unmanned aerial vehicles. Over the past few years, the fast progress in data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) has brought a fast-increasing trend to empower MSF systems by deep learning techniques to further improve performance, especially on intelligent systems and their perception systems. Although quite a few AI-enabled MSF perception systems and techniques have been proposed, up to the present, limited benchmarks that focus on MSF perception are publicly available. Given that many intelligent systems such as self-driving cars are operated in safety-critical contexts where perception systems play an important role, there comes an urgent need for a more in-depth understanding of the performance and reliability of these MSF systems. To bridge this gap, we initiate an early step in this direction and construct a public benchmark of AI-enabled MSF-based perception systems including three commonly adopted tasks (i.e., object detection, object tracking, and depth completion). Based on this, to comprehensively understand MSF systems' robustness and reliability, we design 14 common and realistic corruption patterns to synthesize large-scale corrupted datasets. We further perform a systematic evaluation of these systems through our large-scale evaluation. Our results reveal the vulnerability of the current AI-enabled MSF perception systems, calling for researchers and practitioners to take robustness and reliability into account when designing AI-enabled MSF.

Neuromorphic spintronics combines two advanced fields in technology, neuromorphic computing and spintronics, to create brain-inspired, efficient computing systems that leverage the unique properties of the electron's spin. In this book chapter, we first introduce both fields - neuromorphic computing and spintronics and then make a case for neuromorphic spintronics. We discuss concrete examples of neuromorphic spintronics, including computing based on fluctuations, artificial neural networks, and reservoir computing, highlighting their potential to revolutionize computational efficiency and functionality.

The combination of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) and Transformers has attracted significant attention due to their potential for high energy efficiency and high-performance nature. However, existing works on this topic typically rely on direct training, which can lead to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we propose to leverage the benefits of the ANN-to-SNN conversion method to combine SNNs and Transformers, resulting in significantly improved performance over existing state-of-the-art SNN models. Furthermore, inspired by the quantal synaptic failures observed in the nervous system, which reduces the number of spikes transmitted across synapses, we introduce a novel Masked Spiking Transformer (MST) framework that incorporates a Random Spike Masking (RSM) method to prune redundant spikes and reduce energy consumption without sacrificing performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MST model achieves a significant reduction of 26.8% in power consumption when the masking ratio is 75% while maintaining the same level of performance as the unmasked model.

Visual motion processing is essential for humans to perceive and interact with dynamic environments. Despite extensive research in cognitive neuroscience, image-computable models that can extract informative motion flow from natural scenes in a manner consistent with human visual processing have yet to be established. Meanwhile, recent advancements in computer vision (CV), propelled by deep learning, have led to significant progress in optical flow estimation, a task closely related to motion perception. Here we propose an image-computable model of human motion perception by bridging the gap between biological and CV models. Specifically, we introduce a novel two-stages approach that combines trainable motion energy sensing with a recurrent self-attention network for adaptive motion integration and segregation. This model architecture aims to capture the computations in V1-MT, the core structure for motion perception in the biological visual system, while providing the ability to derive informative motion flow for a wide range of stimuli, including complex natural scenes. In silico neurophysiology reveals that our model's unit responses are similar to mammalian neural recordings regarding motion pooling and speed tuning. The proposed model can also replicate human responses to a range of stimuli examined in past psychophysical studies. The experimental results on the Sintel benchmark demonstrate that our model predicts human responses better than the ground truth, whereas the state-of-the-art CV models show the opposite. Our study provides a computational architecture consistent with human visual motion processing, although the physiological correspondence may not be exact.

Neural decoding, a critical component of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), has recently attracted increasing research interest. Previous research has focused on leveraging signal processing and deep learning methods to enhance neural decoding performance. However, the in-depth exploration of model architectures remains underexplored, despite its proven effectiveness in other tasks such as energy forecasting and image classification. In this study, we propose NeuroSketch, an effective framework for neural decoding via systematic architecture optimization. Starting with the basic architecture study, we find that CNN-2D outperforms other architectures in neural decoding tasks and explore its effectiveness from temporal and spatial perspectives. Building on this, we optimize the architecture from macro- to micro-level, achieving improvements in performance at each step. The exploration process and model validations take over 5,000 experiments spanning three distinct modalities (visual, auditory, and speech), three types of brain signals (EEG, SEEG, and ECoG), and eight diverse decoding tasks. Experimental results indicate that NeuroSketch achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across all evaluated datasets, positioning it as a powerful tool for neural decoding. Our code and scripts are available at https://github.com/Galaxy-Dawn/NeuroSketch.

Spiking Large Language Models have been shown as a good alternative to LLMs in various scenarios. Existing methods for creating Spiking LLMs, i.e., direct training and ANN-SNN conversion, often suffer from performance degradation and relatively high computational costs. To address these issues, we propose a novel Fast ANN-SNN conversion strategy (FAS) that transforms LLMs into spiking LLMs in two stages. The first stage employs a full-parameter fine-tuning of pre-trained models, so it does not need any direct training from scratch. The second stage introduces a coarse-to-fine calibration method to reduce conversion errors and improve accuracy. Experiments on both language and vision-language tasks across four different scales of LLMs demonstrate that FAS can achieve state-of-the-art performance yet with significantly reduced inference latency and computational costs. Notably, FAS only takes eight timesteps to achieve an accuracy of 3\% higher than that of the OPT-7B model, while reducing energy consumption by 96.63\%. The source code is available at https://github.com/lc783/FAS

With the rapid development of AI hardware accelerators, applying deep learning-based algorithms to solve various low-level vision tasks on mobile devices has gradually become possible. However, two main problems still need to be solved: task-specific algorithms make it difficult to integrate them into a single neural network architecture, and large amounts of parameters make it difficult to achieve real-time inference. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel network, SYENet, with only ~6K parameters, to handle multiple low-level vision tasks on mobile devices in a real-time manner. The SYENet consists of two asymmetrical branches with simple building blocks. To effectively connect the results by asymmetrical branches, a Quadratic Connection Unit(QCU) is proposed. Furthermore, to improve performance, a new Outlier-Aware Loss is proposed to process the image. The proposed method proves its superior performance with the best PSNR as compared with other networks in real-time applications such as Image Signal Processing(ISP), Low-Light Enhancement(LLE), and Super-Resolution(SR) with 2K60FPS throughput on Qualcomm 8 Gen 1 mobile SoC(System-on-Chip). Particularly, for ISP task, SYENet got the highest score in MAI 2022 Learned Smartphone ISP challenge.

Spike-based Transformer presents a compelling and energy-efficient alternative to traditional Artificial Neural Network (ANN)-based Transformers, achieving impressive results through sparse binary computations. However, existing spike-based transformers predominantly focus on spatial attention while neglecting crucial temporal dependencies inherent in spike-based processing, leading to suboptimal feature representation and limited performance. To address this limitation, we propose Spiking Transformer with Spatial-Temporal Attention (STAtten), a simple and straightforward architecture that efficiently integrates both spatial and temporal information in the self-attention mechanism. STAtten introduces a block-wise computation strategy that processes information in spatial-temporal chunks, enabling comprehensive feature capture while maintaining the same computational complexity as previous spatial-only approaches. Our method can be seamlessly integrated into existing spike-based transformers without architectural overhaul. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STAtten significantly improves the performance of existing spike-based transformers across both static and neuromorphic datasets, including CIFAR10/100, ImageNet, CIFAR10-DVS, and N-Caltech101. The code is available at https://github.com/Intelligent-Computing-Lab-Yale/STAtten

Model compression is essential in the deployment of large Computer Vision models on embedded devices. However, static optimization techniques (e.g. pruning, quantization, etc.) neglect the fact that different inputs have different complexities, thus requiring different amount of computations. Dynamic Neural Networks allow to condition the number of computations to the specific input. The current literature on the topic is very extensive and fragmented. We present a comprehensive survey that synthesizes and unifies existing Dynamic Neural Networks research in the context of Computer Vision. Additionally, we provide a logical taxonomy based on which component of the network is adaptive: the output, the computation graph or the input. Furthermore, we argue that Dynamic Neural Networks are particularly beneficial in the context of Sensor Fusion for better adaptivity, noise reduction and information prioritization. We present preliminary works in this direction. We complement this survey with a curated repository listing all the surveyed papers, each with a brief summary of the solution and the code base when available: https://github.com/DTU-PAS/awesome-dynn-for-cv .

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are energy efficient alternatives to commonly used deep neural networks (DNNs). Through event-driven information processing, SNNs can reduce the expensive compute requirements of DNNs considerably, while achieving comparable performance. However, high inference latency is a significant hindrance to the edge deployment of deep SNNs. Computation over multiple timesteps not only increases latency as well as overall energy budget due to higher number of operations, but also incurs memory access overhead of fetching membrane potentials, both of which lessen the energy benefits of SNNs. To overcome this bottleneck and leverage the full potential of SNNs, we propose an Iterative Initialization and Retraining method for SNNs (IIR-SNN) to perform single shot inference in the temporal axis. The method starts with an SNN trained with T timesteps (T>1). Then at each stage of latency reduction, the network trained at previous stage with higher timestep is utilized as initialization for subsequent training with lower timestep. This acts as a compression method, as the network is gradually shrunk in the temporal domain. In this paper, we use direct input encoding and choose T=5, since as per literature, it is the minimum required latency to achieve satisfactory performance on ImageNet. The proposed scheme allows us to obtain SNNs with up to unit latency, requiring a single forward pass during inference. We achieve top-1 accuracy of 93.05%, 70.15% and 67.71% on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet, respectively using VGG16, with just 1 timestep. In addition, IIR-SNNs perform inference with 5-2500X reduced latency compared to other state-of-the-art SNNs, maintaining comparable or even better accuracy. Furthermore, in comparison with standard DNNs, the proposed IIR-SNNs provide25-33X higher energy efficiency, while being comparable to them in classification performance.

Autonomous driving in high-speed racing, as opposed to urban environments, presents significant challenges in scene understanding due to rapid changes in the track environment. Traditional sequential network approaches may struggle to meet the real-time knowledge and decision-making demands of an autonomous agent covering large displacements in a short time. This paper proposes a novel baseline architecture for developing sophisticated models capable of true hardware-enabled parallelism, achieving neural processing speeds that mirror the agent's high velocity. The proposed model (Parallel Perception Network (PPN)) consists of two independent neural networks, segmentation and reconstruction networks, running parallelly on separate accelerated hardware. The model takes raw 3D point cloud data from the LiDAR sensor as input and converts it into a 2D Bird's Eye View Map on both devices. Each network independently extracts its input features along space and time dimensions and produces outputs parallelly. The proposed method's model is trained on a system with two NVIDIA T4 GPUs, using a combination of loss functions, including edge preservation, and demonstrates a 2x speedup in model inference time compared to a sequential configuration. Implementation is available at: https://github.com/suwesh/Parallel-Perception-Network. Learned parameters of the trained networks are provided at: https://huggingface.co/suwesh/ParallelPerceptionNetwork.

The liquid state machine (LSM) combines low training complexity and biological plausibility, which has made it an attractive machine learning framework for edge and neuromorphic computing paradigms. Originally proposed as a model of brain computation, the LSM tunes its internal weights without backpropagation of gradients, which results in lower performance compared to multi-layer neural networks. Recent findings in neuroscience suggest that astrocytes, a long-neglected non-neuronal brain cell, modulate synaptic plasticity and brain dynamics, tuning brain networks to the vicinity of the computationally optimal critical phase transition between order and chaos. Inspired by this disruptive understanding of how brain networks self-tune, we propose the neuron-astrocyte liquid state machine (NALSM) that addresses under-performance through self-organized near-critical dynamics. Similar to its biological counterpart, the astrocyte model integrates neuronal activity and provides global feedback to spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), which self-organizes NALSM dynamics around a critical branching factor that is associated with the edge-of-chaos. We demonstrate that NALSM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy versus comparable LSM methods, without the need for data-specific hand-tuning. With a top accuracy of 97.61% on MNIST, 97.51% on N-MNIST, and 85.84% on Fashion-MNIST, NALSM achieved comparable performance to current fully-connected multi-layer spiking neural networks trained via backpropagation. Our findings suggest that the further development of brain-inspired machine learning methods has the potential to reach the performance of deep learning, with the added benefits of supporting robust and energy-efficient neuromorphic computing on the edge.

Large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced by aligning vision inputs with text, significantly improving performance in computer vision tasks. Moreover, for VLMs to be effectively utilized in real-world applications, an understanding of diverse multi-vision sensor data, such as thermal, depth, and X-ray information, is essential. However, we find that current VLMs process multi-vision sensor images without deep understanding of sensor information, disregarding each sensor's unique physical properties. This limitation restricts their capacity to interpret and respond to complex questions requiring multi-vision sensor reasoning. To address this, we propose a novel Multi-vision Sensor Perception and Reasoning (MS-PR) benchmark, assessing VLMs on their capacity for sensor-specific reasoning. Moreover, we introduce Diverse Negative Attributes (DNA) optimization to enable VLMs to perform deep reasoning on multi-vision sensor tasks, helping to bridge the core information gap between images and sensor data. Extensive experimental results validate that the proposed DNA method can significantly improve the multi-vision sensor reasoning for VLMs.

Recent advancements in the direct training of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have demonstrated high-quality outputs even at early timesteps, paving the way for novel energy-efficient AI paradigms. However, the inherent non-linearity and temporal dependencies in SNNs introduce persistent challenges, such as temporal covariate shift (TCS) and unstable gradient flow with learnable neuron thresholds. In this paper, we present two key innovations: MP-Init (Membrane Potential Initialization) and TrSG (Threshold-robust Surrogate Gradient). MP-Init addresses TCS by aligning the initial membrane potential with its stationary distribution, while TrSG stabilizes gradient flow with respect to threshold voltage during training. Extensive experiments validate our approach, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy on both static and dynamic image datasets. The code is available at: https://github.com/kookhh0827/SNN-MP-Init-TRSG

Our research aims to develop machines that learn to perceive visual motion as do humans. While recent advances in computer vision (CV) have enabled DNN-based models to accurately estimate optical flow in naturalistic images, a significant disparity remains between CV models and the biological visual system in both architecture and behavior. This disparity includes humans' ability to perceive the motion of higher-order image features (second-order motion), which many CV models fail to capture because of their reliance on the intensity conservation law. Our model architecture mimics the cortical V1-MT motion processing pathway, utilizing a trainable motion energy sensor bank and a recurrent graph network. Supervised learning employing diverse naturalistic videos allows the model to replicate psychophysical and physiological findings about first-order (luminance-based) motion perception. For second-order motion, inspired by neuroscientific findings, the model includes an additional sensing pathway with nonlinear preprocessing before motion energy sensing, implemented using a simple multilayer 3D CNN block. When exploring how the brain acquired the ability to perceive second-order motion in natural environments, in which pure second-order signals are rare, we hypothesized that second-order mechanisms were critical when estimating robust object motion amidst optical fluctuations, such as highlights on glossy surfaces. We trained our dual-pathway model on novel motion datasets with varying material properties of moving objects. We found that training to estimate object motion from non-Lambertian materials naturally endowed the model with the capacity to perceive second-order motion, as can humans. The resulting model effectively aligns with biological systems while generalizing to both first- and second-order motion phenomena in natural scenes.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), known for their biologically plausible architecture, face the challenge of limited performance. The self-attention mechanism, which is the cornerstone of the high-performance Transformer and also a biologically inspired structure, is absent in existing SNNs. To this end, we explore the potential of leveraging both self-attention capability and biological properties of SNNs, and propose a novel Spiking Self-Attention (SSA) and Spiking Transformer (Spikformer). The SSA mechanism eliminates the need for softmax and captures the sparse visual feature employing spike-based Query, Key, and Value. This sparse computation without multiplication makes SSA efficient and energy-saving. Further, we develop a Spiking Convolutional Stem (SCS) with supplementary convolutional layers to enhance the architecture of Spikformer. The Spikformer enhanced with the SCS is referred to as Spikformer V2. To train larger and deeper Spikformer V2, we introduce a pioneering exploration of Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) within the SNN. Specifically, we pre-train Spikformer V2 with masking and reconstruction style inspired by the mainstream self-supervised Transformer, and then finetune the Spikformer V2 on the image classification on ImageNet. Extensive experiments show that Spikformer V2 outperforms other previous surrogate training and ANN2SNN methods. An 8-layer Spikformer V2 achieves an accuracy of 80.38% using 4 time steps, and after SSL, a 172M 16-layer Spikformer V2 reaches an accuracy of 81.10% with just 1 time step. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the SNN achieves 80+% accuracy on ImageNet. The code will be available at Spikformer V2.

Touch is a crucial sensing modality that provides rich information about object properties and interactions with the physical environment. Humans and robots both benefit from using touch to perceive and interact with the surrounding environment (Johansson and Flanagan, 2009; Li et al., 2020; Calandra et al., 2017). However, no existing systems provide rich, multi-modal digital touch-sensing capabilities through a hemispherical compliant embodiment. Here, we describe several conceptual and technological innovations to improve the digitization of touch. These advances are embodied in an artificial finger-shaped sensor with advanced sensing capabilities. Significantly, this fingertip contains high-resolution sensors (~8.3 million taxels) that respond to omnidirectional touch, capture multi-modal signals, and use on-device artificial intelligence to process the data in real time. Evaluations show that the artificial fingertip can resolve spatial features as small as 7 um, sense normal and shear forces with a resolution of 1.01 mN and 1.27 mN, respectively, perceive vibrations up to 10 kHz, sense heat, and even sense odor. Furthermore, it embeds an on-device AI neural network accelerator that acts as a peripheral nervous system on a robot and mimics the reflex arc found in humans. These results demonstrate the possibility of digitizing touch with superhuman performance. The implications are profound, and we anticipate potential applications in robotics (industrial, medical, agricultural, and consumer-level), virtual reality and telepresence, prosthetics, and e-commerce. Toward digitizing touch at scale, we open-source a modular platform to facilitate future research on the nature of touch.

Event cameras are dynamic vision sensors inspired by the biological retina, characterized by their high dynamic range, high temporal resolution, and low power consumption. These features make them capable of perceiving 3D environments even in extreme conditions. Event data is continuous across the time dimension, which allows a detailed description of each pixel's movements. To fully utilize the temporally dense and continuous nature of event cameras, we propose a novel temporal event stereo, a framework that continuously uses information from previous time steps. This is accomplished through the simultaneous training of an event stereo matching network alongside stereoscopic flow, a new concept that captures all pixel movements from stereo cameras. Since obtaining ground truth for optical flow during training is challenging, we propose a method that uses only disparity maps to train the stereoscopic flow. The performance of event-based stereo matching is enhanced by temporally aggregating information using the flows. We have achieved state-of-the-art performance on the MVSEC and the DSEC datasets. The method is computationally efficient, as it stacks previous information in a cascading manner. The code is available at https://github.com/mickeykang16/TemporalEventStereo.

Due to the high price and heavy energy consumption of GPUs, deploying deep models on IoT devices such as microcontrollers makes significant contributions for ecological AI. Conventional methods successfully enable convolutional neural network inference of high resolution images on microcontrollers, while the framework for vision transformers that achieve the state-of-the-art performance in many vision applications still remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose a hardware-algorithm co-optimizations method called MCUFormer to deploy vision transformers on microcontrollers with extremely limited memory, where we jointly design transformer architecture and construct the inference operator library to fit the memory resource constraint. More specifically, we generalize the one-shot network architecture search (NAS) to discover the optimal architecture with highest task performance given the memory budget from the microcontrollers, where we enlarge the existing search space of vision transformers by considering the low-rank decomposition dimensions and patch resolution for memory reduction. For the construction of the inference operator library of vision transformers, we schedule the memory buffer during inference through operator integration, patch embedding decomposition, and token overwriting, allowing the memory buffer to be fully utilized to adapt to the forward pass of the vision transformer. Experimental results demonstrate that our MCUFormer achieves 73.62\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet for image classification with 320KB memory on STM32F746 microcontroller. Code is available at https://github.com/liangyn22/MCUFormer.

Mainstream Transformer-based large language models face major efficiency bottlenecks: training computation scales quadratically with sequence length, and inference memory grows linearly, limiting long-context processing. Building large models on non-NVIDIA platforms also poses challenges for stable and efficient training. To address this, we introduce SpikingBrain, a family of brain-inspired models designed for efficient long-context training and inference. SpikingBrain leverages the MetaX GPU cluster and focuses on three aspects: (1) Model Architecture: linear and hybrid-linear attention architectures with adaptive spiking neurons; (2) Algorithmic Optimizations: an efficient, conversion-based training pipeline and a dedicated spike coding framework; (3) System Engineering: customized training frameworks, operator libraries, and parallelism strategies tailored to MetaX hardware. Using these techniques, we develop two models: SpikingBrain-7B, a linear LLM, and SpikingBrain-76B, a hybrid-linear MoE LLM. These models demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale LLM development on non-NVIDIA platforms. SpikingBrain achieves performance comparable to open-source Transformer baselines while using only about 150B tokens for continual pre-training. Our models significantly improve long-sequence training efficiency and deliver inference with (partially) constant memory and event-driven spiking behavior. For example, SpikingBrain-7B attains over 100x speedup in Time to First Token for 4M-token sequences. Training remains stable for weeks on hundreds of MetaX C550 GPUs, with the 7B model reaching a Model FLOPs Utilization of 23.4 percent. The proposed spiking scheme achieves 69.15 percent sparsity, enabling low-power operation. Overall, this work demonstrates the potential of brain-inspired mechanisms to drive the next generation of efficient and scalable large model design.

Microsaccades are small, involuntary eye movements vital for visual perception and neural processing. Traditional microsaccade studies typically use eye trackers or frame-based analysis, which, while precise, are costly and limited in scalability and temporal resolution. Event-based sensing offers a high-speed, low-latency alternative by capturing fine-grained spatiotemporal changes efficiently. This work introduces a pioneering event-based microsaccade dataset to support research on small eye movement dynamics in cognitive computing. Using Blender, we render high-fidelity eye movement scenarios and simulate microsaccades with angular displacements from 0.5 to 2.0 degrees, divided into seven distinct classes. These are converted to event streams using v2e, preserving the natural temporal dynamics of microsaccades, with durations ranging from 0.25 ms to 2.25 ms. We evaluate the dataset using Spiking-VGG11, Spiking-VGG13, and Spiking-VGG16, and propose Spiking-VGG16Flow, an optical-flow-enhanced variant implemented in SpikingJelly. The models achieve around 90 percent average accuracy, successfully classifying microsaccades by angular displacement, independent of event count or duration. These results demonstrate the potential of spiking neural networks for fine motion recognition and establish a benchmark for event-based vision research. The dataset, code, and trained models will be publicly available at https://waseemshariff126.github.io/microsaccades/ .

This thesis presents and evaluates the Dilated Convolution with Learnable Spacings (DCLS) method. Through various supervised learning experiments in the fields of computer vision, audio, and speech processing, the DCLS method proves to outperform both standard and advanced convolution techniques. The research is organized into several steps, starting with an analysis of the literature and existing convolution techniques that preceded the development of the DCLS method. We were particularly interested in the methods that are closely related to our own and that remain essential to capture the nuances and uniqueness of our approach. The cornerstone of our study is the introduction and application of the DCLS method to convolutional neural networks (CNNs), as well as to hybrid architectures that rely on both convolutional and visual attention approaches. DCLS is shown to be particularly effective in tasks such as classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Initially using bilinear interpolation, the study also explores other interpolation methods, finding that Gaussian interpolation slightly improves performance. The DCLS method is further applied to spiking neural networks (SNNs) to enable synaptic delay learning within a neural network that could eventually be transferred to so-called neuromorphic chips. The results show that the DCLS method stands out as a new state-of-the-art technique in SNN audio classification for certain benchmark tasks in this field. These tasks involve datasets with a high temporal component. In addition, we show that DCLS can significantly improve the accuracy of artificial neural networks for the multi-label audio classification task. We conclude with a discussion of the chosen experimental setup, its limitations, the limitations of our method, and our results.

This paper presents the first application of spiking neural networks (SNNs) for the classification of chronic lower back pain (CLBP) using the EmoPain dataset. Our work has two main contributions. We introduce Spike Threshold Adaptive Learning (STAL), a trainable encoder that effectively converts continuous biosignals into spike trains. Additionally, we propose an ensemble of Spiking Recurrent Neural Network (SRNN) classifiers for the multi-stream processing of sEMG and IMU data. To tackle the challenges of small sample size and class imbalance, we implement minority over-sampling with weighted sample replacement during batch creation. Our method achieves outstanding performance with an accuracy of 80.43%, AUC of 67.90%, F1 score of 52.60%, and Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.437, surpassing traditional rate-based and latency-based encoding methods. The STAL encoder shows superior performance in preserving temporal dynamics and adapting to signal characteristics. Importantly, our approach (STAL-SRNN) outperforms the best deep learning method in terms of MCC, indicating better balanced class prediction. This research contributes to the development of neuromorphic computing for biosignal analysis. It holds promise for energy-efficient, wearable solutions in chronic pain management.

Many learning algorithms used as normative models in neuroscience or as candidate approaches for learning on neuromorphic chips learn by contrasting one set of network states with another. These Contrastive Learning (CL) algorithms are traditionally implemented with rigid, temporally non-local, and periodic learning dynamics that could limit the range of physical systems capable of harnessing CL. In this study, we build on recent work exploring how CL might be implemented by biological or neurmorphic systems and show that this form of learning can be made temporally local, and can still function even if many of the dynamical requirements of standard training procedures are relaxed. Thanks to a set of general theorems corroborated by numerical experiments across several CL models, our results provide theoretical foundations for the study and development of CL methods for biological and neuromorphic neural networks.

Prior works on event-based optical flow estimation have investigated several gradient-based learning methods to train neural networks for predicting optical flow. However, they do not utilize the fast data rate of event data streams and rely on a spatio-temporal representation constructed from a collection of events over a fixed period of time (often between two grayscale frames). As a result, optical flow is only evaluated at a frequency much lower than the rate data is produced by an event-based camera, leading to a temporally sparse optical flow estimation. To predict temporally dense optical flow, we cast the problem as a sequential learning task and propose a training methodology to train sequential networks for continuous prediction on an event stream. We propose two types of networks: one focused on performance and another focused on compute efficiency. We first train long-short term memory networks (LSTMs) on the DSEC dataset and demonstrated 10x temporally dense optical flow estimation over existing flow estimation approaches. The additional benefit of having a memory to draw long temporal correlations back in time results in a 19.7% improvement in flow prediction accuracy of LSTMs over similar networks with no memory elements. We subsequently show that the inherent recurrence of spiking neural networks (SNNs) enables them to learn and estimate temporally dense optical flow with 31.8% lesser parameters than LSTM, but with a slightly increased error. This demonstrates potential for energy-efficient implementation of fast optical flow prediction using SNNs.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) and MLPs signal further efforts on replacing hand-wired features or inductive biases with general-purpose neural architectures. Existing works empower the models by massive data, such as large-scale pre-training and/or repeated strong data augmentations, and still report optimization-related problems (e.g., sensitivity to initialization and learning rates). Hence, this paper investigates ViTs and MLP-Mixers from the lens of loss geometry, intending to improve the models' data efficiency at training and generalization at inference. Visualization and Hessian reveal extremely sharp local minima of converged models. By promoting smoothness with a recently proposed sharpness-aware optimizer, we substantially improve the accuracy and robustness of ViTs and MLP-Mixers on various tasks spanning supervised, adversarial, contrastive, and transfer learning (e.g., +5.3\% and +11.0\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet for ViT-B/16 and Mixer-B/16, respectively, with the simple Inception-style preprocessing). We show that the improved smoothness attributes to sparser active neurons in the first few layers. The resultant ViTs outperform ResNets of similar size and throughput when trained from scratch on ImageNet without large-scale pre-training or strong data augmentations. Model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/google-research/vision_transformer.

Artificial neural networks for motor control usually adopt generic architectures like fully connected MLPs. While general, these tabula rasa architectures rely on large amounts of experience to learn, are not easily transferable to new bodies, and have internal dynamics that are difficult to interpret. In nature, animals are born with highly structured connectivity in their nervous systems shaped by evolution; this innate circuitry acts synergistically with learning mechanisms to provide inductive biases that enable most animals to function well soon after birth and learn efficiently. Convolutional networks inspired by visual circuitry have encoded useful biases for vision. However, it is unknown the extent to which ANN architectures inspired by neural circuitry can yield useful biases for other AI domains. In this work, we ask what advantages biologically inspired ANN architecture can provide in the domain of motor control. Specifically, we translate C. elegans locomotion circuits into an ANN model controlling a simulated Swimmer agent. On a locomotion task, our architecture achieves good initial performance and asymptotic performance comparable with MLPs, while dramatically improving data efficiency and requiring orders of magnitude fewer parameters. Our architecture is interpretable and transfers to new body designs. An ablation analysis shows that constrained excitation/inhibition is crucial for learning, while weight initialization contributes to good initial performance. Our work demonstrates several advantages of biologically inspired ANN architecture and encourages future work in more complex embodied control.

Very recently, a variety of vision transformer architectures for dense prediction tasks have been proposed and they show that the design of spatial attention is critical to their success in these tasks. In this work, we revisit the design of the spatial attention and demonstrate that a carefully-devised yet simple spatial attention mechanism performs favourably against the state-of-the-art schemes. As a result, we propose two vision transformer architectures, namely, Twins-PCPVT and Twins-SVT. Our proposed architectures are highly-efficient and easy to implement, only involving matrix multiplications that are highly optimized in modern deep learning frameworks. More importantly, the proposed architectures achieve excellent performance on a wide range of visual tasks, including image level classification as well as dense detection and segmentation. The simplicity and strong performance suggest that our proposed architectures may serve as stronger backbones for many vision tasks. Our code is released at https://github.com/Meituan-AutoML/Twins .

It has long been known in both neuroscience and AI that ``binding'' between neurons leads to a form of competitive learning where representations are compressed in order to represent more abstract concepts in deeper layers of the network. More recently, it was also hypothesized that dynamic (spatiotemporal) representations play an important role in both neuroscience and AI. Building on these ideas, we introduce Artificial Kuramoto Oscillatory Neurons (AKOrN) as a dynamical alternative to threshold units, which can be combined with arbitrary connectivity designs such as fully connected, convolutional, or attentive mechanisms. Our generalized Kuramoto updates bind neurons together through their synchronization dynamics. We show that this idea provides performance improvements across a wide spectrum of tasks such as unsupervised object discovery, adversarial robustness, calibrated uncertainty quantification, and reasoning. We believe that these empirical results show the importance of rethinking our assumptions at the most basic neuronal level of neural representation, and in particular show the importance of dynamical representations.

Multimodal learning enhances the perceptual capabilities of cognitive systems by integrating information from different sensory modalities. However, existing multimodal fusion research typically assumes static integration, not fully incorporating key dynamic mechanisms found in the brain. Specifically, the brain exhibits an inverse effectiveness phenomenon, wherein weaker unimodal cues yield stronger multisensory integration benefits; conversely, when individual modal cues are stronger, the effect of fusion is diminished. This mechanism enables biological systems to achieve robust cognition even with scarce or noisy perceptual cues. Inspired by this biological mechanism, we explore the relationship between multimodal output and information from individual modalities, proposing an inverse effectiveness driven multimodal fusion (IEMF) strategy. By incorporating this strategy into neural networks, we achieve more efficient integration with improved model performance and computational efficiency, demonstrating up to 50% reduction in computational cost across diverse fusion methods. We conduct experiments on audio-visual classification, continual learning, and question answering tasks to validate our method. Results consistently demonstrate that our method performs excellently in these tasks. To verify universality and generalization, we also conduct experiments on Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Spiking Neural Networks (SNN), with results showing good adaptability to both network types. Our research emphasizes the potential of incorporating biologically inspired mechanisms into multimodal networks and provides promising directions for the future development of multimodal artificial intelligence. The code is available at https://github.com/Brain-Cog-Lab/IEMF.

Recently, physical adversarial attacks have been presented to evade DNNs-based object detectors. To ensure the security, many scenarios are simultaneously deployed with visible sensors and infrared sensors, leading to the failures of these single-modal physical attacks. To show the potential risks under such scenes, we propose a unified adversarial patch to perform cross-modal physical attacks, i.e., fooling visible and infrared object detectors at the same time via a single patch. Considering different imaging mechanisms of visible and infrared sensors, our work focuses on modeling the shapes of adversarial patches, which can be captured in different modalities when they change. To this end, we design a novel boundary-limited shape optimization to achieve the compact and smooth shapes, and thus they can be easily implemented in the physical world. In addition, to balance the fooling degree between visible detector and infrared detector during the optimization process, we propose a score-aware iterative evaluation, which can guide the adversarial patch to iteratively reduce the predicted scores of the multi-modal sensors. We finally test our method against the one-stage detector: YOLOv3 and the two-stage detector: Faster RCNN. Results show that our unified patch achieves an Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 73.33% and 69.17%, respectively. More importantly, we verify the effective attacks in the physical world when visible and infrared sensors shoot the objects under various settings like different angles, distances, postures, and scenes.

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), a new novel view synthesis with implicit scene representation has taken the field of Computer Vision by storm. As a novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction method, NeRF models find applications in robotics, urban mapping, autonomous navigation, virtual reality/augmented reality, and more. Since the original paper by Mildenhall et al., more than 250 preprints were published, with more than 100 eventually being accepted in tier one Computer Vision Conferences. Given NeRF popularity and the current interest in this research area, we believe it necessary to compile a comprehensive survey of NeRF papers from the past two years, which we organized into both architecture, and application based taxonomies. We also provide an introduction to the theory of NeRF based novel view synthesis, and a benchmark comparison of the performance and speed of key NeRF models. By creating this survey, we hope to introduce new researchers to NeRF, provide a helpful reference for influential works in this field, as well as motivate future research directions with our discussion section.

Artificial neural networks have become a staple computing technique in many fields. Yet, they present fundamental differences with classical computing hardware in the way they process information. Photonic implementations of neural network architectures potentially offer fundamental advantages over their electronic counterparts in terms of speed, processing parallelism, scalability and energy efficiency. Scalable and high performance photonic neural networks (PNNs) have been demonstrated, yet they remain scarce. In this work, we study the performance of such a scalable, fully parallel and autonomous PNN based on a large area vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (LA-VCSEL). We show how the performance varies with different physical parameters, namely, injection wavelength, injection power, and bias current. Furthermore, we link these physical parameters to the general computational measures of consistency and dimensionality. We present a general method of gauging dimensionality in high dimensional nonlinear systems subject to noise, which could be applied to many systems in the context of neuromorphic computing. Our work will inform future implementations of spatially multiplexed VCSEL PNNs.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have ultra-low energy consumption and high biological plausibility due to their binary and bio-driven nature compared with artificial neural networks (ANNs). While previous research has primarily focused on enhancing the performance of SNNs in classification tasks, the generative potential of SNNs remains relatively unexplored. In our paper, we put forward Spiking Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (SDDPM), a new class of SNN-based generative models that achieve high sample quality. To fully exploit the energy efficiency of SNNs, we propose a purely Spiking U-Net architecture, which achieves comparable performance to its ANN counterpart using only 4 time steps, resulting in significantly reduced energy consumption. Extensive experimental results reveal that our approach achieves state-of-the-art on the generative tasks and substantially outperforms other SNN-based generative models, achieving up to 12x and 6x improvement on the CIFAR-10 and the CelebA datasets, respectively. Moreover, we propose a threshold-guided strategy that can further improve the performances by 2.69% in a training-free manner. The SDDPM symbolizes a significant advancement in the field of SNN generation, injecting new perspectives and potential avenues of exploration. Our code is available at https://github.com/AndyCao1125/SDDPM.

Epilepsy is a common disease of the nervous system. Timely prediction of seizures and intervention treatment can significantly reduce the accidental injury of patients and protect the life and health of patients. This paper presents a neuromorphic Spiking Convolutional Transformer, named Spiking Conformer, to detect and predict epileptic seizure segments from scalped long-term electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings. We report evaluation results from the Spiking Conformer model using the Boston Children's Hospital-MIT (CHB-MIT) EEG dataset. By leveraging spike-based addition operations, the Spiking Conformer significantly reduces the classification computational cost compared to the non-spiking model. Additionally, we introduce an approximate spiking neuron layer to further reduce spike-triggered neuron updates by nearly 38% without sacrificing accuracy. Using raw EEG data as input, the proposed Spiking Conformer achieved an average sensitivity rate of 94.9% and a specificity rate of 99.3% for the seizure detection task, and 96.8%, 89.5% for the seizure prediction task, and needs >10x fewer operations compared to the non-spiking equivalent model.

Efficient detectors for edge devices are often optimized for parameters or speed count metrics, which remain in weak correlation with the energy of detectors. However, some vision applications of convolutional neural networks, such as always-on surveillance cameras, are critical for energy constraints. This paper aims to serve as a baseline by designing detectors to reach tradeoffs between energy and performance from two perspectives: 1) We extensively analyze various CNNs to identify low-energy architectures, including selecting activation functions, convolutions operators, and feature fusion structures on necks. These underappreciated details in past work seriously affect the energy consumption of detectors; 2) To break through the dilemmatic energy-performance problem, we propose a balanced detector driven by energy using discovered low-energy components named FemtoDet. In addition to the novel construction, we improve FemtoDet by considering convolutions and training strategy optimizations. Specifically, we develop a new instance boundary enhancement (IBE) module for convolution optimization to overcome the contradiction between the limited capacity of CNNs and detection tasks in diverse spatial representations, and propose a recursive warm-restart (RecWR) for optimizing training strategy to escape the sub-optimization of light-weight detectors by considering the data shift produced in popular augmentations. As a result, FemtoDet with only 68.77k parameters achieves a competitive score of 46.3 AP50 on PASCAL VOC and 1.11 W & 64.47 FPS on Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 CPU platforms. Extensive experiments on COCO and TJU-DHD datasets indicate that the proposed method achieves competitive results in diverse scenes.

In this article, we describe an algorithm for solving Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization problems on the Intel Loihi 2 neuromorphic processor. The solver is based on a hardware-aware fine-grained parallel simulated annealing algorithm developed for Intel's neuromorphic research chip Loihi 2. Preliminary results show that our approach can generate feasible solutions in as little as 1 ms and up to 37x more energy efficient compared to two baseline solvers running on a CPU. These advantages could be especially relevant for size-, weight-, and power-constrained edge computing applications.

Deep Neural Networks lead the state of the art of computer vision tasks. Despite this, Neural Networks are brittle in that small changes in the input can drastically affect their prediction outcome and confidence. Consequently and naturally, research in this area mainly focus on adversarial attacks and defenses. In this paper, we take an alternative stance and introduce the concept of Assistive Signals, which are optimized to improve a model's confidence score regardless if it's under attack or not. We analyse some interesting properties of these assistive perturbations and extend the idea to optimize assistive signals in the 3D space for real-life scenarios simulating different lighting conditions and viewing angles. Experimental evaluations show that the assistive signals generated by our optimization method increase the accuracy and confidence of deep models more than those generated by conventional methods that work in the 2D space. In addition, our Assistive Signals illustrate the intrinsic bias of ML models towards certain patterns in real-life objects. We discuss how we can exploit these insights to re-think, or avoid, some patterns that might contribute to, or degrade, the detectability of objects in the real-world.

The Spiking Neural Network (SNN) has attracted more and more attention recently. It adopts binary spike signals to transmit information. Benefitting from the information passing paradigm of SNNs, the multiplications of activations and weights can be replaced by additions, which are more energy-efficient. However, its ``Hard Reset" mechanism for the firing activity would ignore the difference among membrane potentials when the membrane potential is above the firing threshold, causing information loss. Meanwhile, quantifying the membrane potential to 0/1 spikes at the firing instants will inevitably introduce the quantization error thus bringing about information loss too. To address these problems, we propose to use the ``Soft Reset" mechanism for the supervised training-based SNNs, which will drive the membrane potential to a dynamic reset potential according to its magnitude, and Membrane Potential Rectifier (MPR) to reduce the quantization error via redistributing the membrane potential to a range close to the spikes. Results show that the SNNs with the ``Soft Reset" mechanism and MPR outperform their vanilla counterparts on both static and dynamic datasets.

We present a simple mathematical model for the mammalian low visual pathway, taking into account its key elements: retina, lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), primary visual cortex (V1). The analogies between the cortical level of the visual system and the structure of popular CNNs, used in image classification tasks, suggests the introduction of an additional preliminary convolutional module inspired to precortical neuronal circuits to improve robustness with respect to global light intensity and contrast variations in the input images. We validate our hypothesis on the popular databases MNIST, FashionMNIST and SVHN, obtaining significantly more robust CNNs with respect to these variations, once such extra module is added.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently garnered considerable attention, emerging as a promising alternative to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in several vision-related applications. However, their large model sizes and high computational and memory demands hinder deployment, especially on resource-constrained devices. This underscores the necessity of algorithm-hardware co-design specific to ViTs, aiming to optimize their performance by tailoring both the algorithmic structure and the underlying hardware accelerator to each other's strengths. Model quantization, by converting high-precision numbers to lower-precision, reduces the computational demands and memory needs of ViTs, allowing the creation of hardware specifically optimized for these quantized algorithms, boosting efficiency. This article provides a comprehensive survey of ViTs quantization and its hardware acceleration. We first delve into the unique architectural attributes of ViTs and their runtime characteristics. Subsequently, we examine the fundamental principles of model quantization, followed by a comparative analysis of the state-of-the-art quantization techniques for ViTs. Additionally, we explore the hardware acceleration of quantized ViTs, highlighting the importance of hardware-friendly algorithm design. In conclusion, this article will discuss ongoing challenges and future research paths. We consistently maintain the related open-source materials at https://github.com/DD-DuDa/awesome-vit-quantization-acceleration.

After their initial success in natural language processing, transformer architectures have rapidly gained traction in computer vision, providing state-of-the-art results for tasks such as image classification, detection, segmentation, and video analysis. We offer three insights based on simple and easy to implement variants of vision transformers. (1) The residual layers of vision transformers, which are usually processed sequentially, can to some extent be processed efficiently in parallel without noticeably affecting the accuracy. (2) Fine-tuning the weights of the attention layers is sufficient to adapt vision transformers to a higher resolution and to other classification tasks. This saves compute, reduces the peak memory consumption at fine-tuning time, and allows sharing the majority of weights across tasks. (3) Adding MLP-based patch pre-processing layers improves Bert-like self-supervised training based on patch masking. We evaluate the impact of these design choices using the ImageNet-1k dataset, and confirm our findings on the ImageNet-v2 test set. Transfer performance is measured across six smaller datasets.

Activation sparsity improves compute efficiency and resource utilization in sparsity-aware neural network accelerators. As the predominant operation in DNNs is multiply-accumulate (MAC) of activations with weights to compute inner products, skipping operations where (at least) one of the two operands is zero can make inference more efficient in terms of latency and power. Spatial sparsification of activations is a popular topic in DNN literature and several methods have already been established to bias a DNN for it. On the other hand, temporal sparsity is an inherent feature of bio-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs), which neuromorphic processing exploits for hardware efficiency. Introducing and exploiting spatio-temporal sparsity, is a topic much less explored in DNN literature, but in perfect resonance with the trend in DNN, to shift from static signal processing to more streaming signal processing. Towards this goal, in this paper we introduce a new DNN layer (called Delta Activation Layer), whose sole purpose is to promote temporal sparsity of activations during training. A Delta Activation Layer casts temporal sparsity into spatial activation sparsity to be exploited when performing sparse tensor multiplications in hardware. By employing delta inference and ``the usual'' spatial sparsification heuristics during training, the resulting model learns to exploit not only spatial but also temporal activation sparsity (for a given input data distribution). One may use the Delta Activation Layer either during vanilla training or during a refinement phase. We have implemented Delta Activation Layer as an extension of the standard Tensoflow-Keras library, and applied it to train deep neural networks on the Human Action Recognition (UCF101) dataset. We report an almost 3x improvement of activation sparsity, with recoverable loss of model accuracy after longer training.

The long-standing problem of novel view synthesis has many applications, notably in sports broadcasting. Photorealistic novel view synthesis of soccer actions, in particular, is of enormous interest to the broadcast industry. Yet only a few industrial solutions have been proposed, and even fewer that achieve near-broadcast quality of the synthetic replays. Except for their setup of multiple static cameras around the playfield, the best proprietary systems disclose close to no information about their inner workings. Leveraging multiple static cameras for such a task indeed presents a challenge rarely tackled in the literature, for a lack of public datasets: the reconstruction of a large-scale, mostly static environment, with small, fast-moving elements. Recently, the emergence of neural radiance fields has induced stunning progress in many novel view synthesis applications, leveraging deep learning principles to produce photorealistic results in the most challenging settings. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of basing a solution to the task on dynamic NeRFs, i.e., neural models purposed to reconstruct general dynamic content. We compose synthetic soccer environments and conduct multiple experiments using them, identifying key components that help reconstruct soccer scenes with dynamic NeRFs. We show that, although this approach cannot fully meet the quality requirements for the target application, it suggests promising avenues toward a cost-efficient, automatic solution. We also make our work dataset and code publicly available, with the goal to encourage further efforts from the research community on the task of novel view synthesis for dynamic soccer scenes. For code, data, and video results, please see https://soccernerfs.isach.be.

Some neurons in deep networks specialize in recognizing highly specific perceptual, structural, or semantic features of inputs. In computer vision, techniques exist for identifying neurons that respond to individual concept categories like colors, textures, and object classes. But these techniques are limited in scope, labeling only a small subset of neurons and behaviors in any network. Is a richer characterization of neuron-level computation possible? We introduce a procedure (called MILAN, for mutual-information-guided linguistic annotation of neurons) that automatically labels neurons with open-ended, compositional, natural language descriptions. Given a neuron, MILAN generates a description by searching for a natural language string that maximizes pointwise mutual information with the image regions in which the neuron is active. MILAN produces fine-grained descriptions that capture categorical, relational, and logical structure in learned features. These descriptions obtain high agreement with human-generated feature descriptions across a diverse set of model architectures and tasks, and can aid in understanding and controlling learned models. We highlight three applications of natural language neuron descriptions. First, we use MILAN for analysis, characterizing the distribution and importance of neurons selective for attribute, category, and relational information in vision models. Second, we use MILAN for auditing, surfacing neurons sensitive to human faces in datasets designed to obscure them. Finally, we use MILAN for editing, improving robustness in an image classifier by deleting neurons sensitive to text features spuriously correlated with class labels.

In recent years, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have become a standard in robotic control. However, a significant drawback of large-scale ANNs is their increased power consumption. This becomes a critical concern when designing autonomous aerial vehicles, given the stringent constraints on power and weight. Especially in the case of blimps, known for their extended endurance, power-efficient control methods are essential. Spiking neural networks (SNN) can provide a solution, facilitating energy-efficient and asynchronous event-driven processing. In this paper, we have evolved SNNs for accurate altitude control of a non-neutrally buoyant indoor blimp, relying solely on onboard sensing and processing power. The blimp's altitude tracking performance significantly improved compared to prior research, showing reduced oscillations and a minimal steady-state error. The parameters of the SNNs were optimized via an evolutionary algorithm, using a Proportional-Derivative-Integral (PID) controller as the target signal. We developed two complementary SNN controllers while examining various hidden layer structures. The first controller responds swiftly to control errors, mitigating overshooting and oscillations, while the second minimizes steady-state errors due to non-neutral buoyancy-induced drift. Despite the blimp's drivetrain limitations, our SNN controllers ensured stable altitude control, employing only 160 spiking neurons.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are a promising research direction for building power-efficient information processing systems, especially for temporal tasks such as speech recognition. In SNNs, delays refer to the time needed for one spike to travel from one neuron to another. These delays matter because they influence the spike arrival times, and it is well-known that spiking neurons respond more strongly to coincident input spikes. More formally, it has been shown theoretically that plastic delays greatly increase the expressivity in SNNs. Yet, efficient algorithms to learn these delays have been lacking. Here, we propose a new discrete-time algorithm that addresses this issue in deep feedforward SNNs using backpropagation, in an offline manner. To simulate delays between consecutive layers, we use 1D convolutions across time. The kernels contain only a few non-zero weights - one per synapse - whose positions correspond to the delays. These positions are learned together with the weights using the recently proposed Dilated Convolution with Learnable Spacings (DCLS). We evaluated our method on three datasets: the Spiking Heidelberg Dataset (SHD), the Spiking Speech Commands (SSC) and its non-spiking version Google Speech Commands v0.02 (GSC) benchmarks, which require detecting temporal patterns. We used feedforward SNNs with two or three hidden fully connected layers, and vanilla leaky integrate-and-fire neurons. We showed that fixed random delays help and that learning them helps even more. Furthermore, our method outperformed the state-of-the-art in the three datasets without using recurrent connections and with substantially fewer parameters. Our work demonstrates the potential of delay learning in developing accurate and precise models for temporal data processing. Our code is based on PyTorch / SpikingJelly and available at: https://github.com/Thvnvtos/SNN-delays

As the physical size of recent CMOS image sensors (CIS) gets smaller, the latest mobile cameras are adopting unique non-Bayer color filter array (CFA) patterns (e.g., Quad, Nona, QxQ), which consist of homogeneous color units with adjacent pixels. These non-Bayer sensors are superior to conventional Bayer CFA thanks to their changeable pixel-bin sizes for different light conditions but may introduce visual artifacts during demosaicing due to their inherent pixel pattern structures and sensor hardware characteristics. Previous demosaicing methods have primarily focused on Bayer CFA, necessitating distinct reconstruction methods for non-Bayer patterned CIS with various CFA modes under different lighting conditions. In this work, we propose an efficient unified demosaicing method that can be applied to both conventional Bayer RAW and various non-Bayer CFAs' RAW data in different operation modes. Our Knowledge Learning-based demosaicing model for Adaptive Patterns, namely KLAP, utilizes CFA-adaptive filters for only 1% key filters in the network for each CFA, but still manages to effectively demosaic all the CFAs, yielding comparable performance to the large-scale models. Furthermore, by employing meta-learning during inference (KLAP-M), our model is able to eliminate unknown sensor-generic artifacts in real RAW data, effectively bridging the gap between synthetic images and real sensor RAW. Our KLAP and KLAP-M methods achieved state-of-the-art demosaicing performance in both synthetic and real RAW data of Bayer and non-Bayer CFAs.

Spiking neural networks have significant potential utility in robotics due to their high energy efficiency on specialized hardware, but proof-of-concept implementations have not yet typically achieved competitive performance or capability with conventional approaches. In this paper, we tackle one of the key practical challenges of scalability by introducing a novel modular ensemble network approach, where compact, localized spiking networks each learn and are solely responsible for recognizing places in a local region of the environment only. This modular approach creates a highly scalable system. However, it comes with a high-performance cost where a lack of global regularization at deployment time leads to hyperactive neurons that erroneously respond to places outside their learned region. Our second contribution introduces a regularization approach that detects and removes these problematic hyperactive neurons during the initial environmental learning phase. We evaluate this new scalable modular system on benchmark localization datasets Nordland and Oxford RobotCar, with comparisons to standard techniques NetVLAD, DenseVLAD, and SAD, and a previous spiking neural network system. Our system substantially outperforms the previous SNN system on its small dataset, but also maintains performance on 27 times larger benchmark datasets where the operation of the previous system is computationally infeasible, and performs competitively with the conventional localization systems.

While Neural Processing Units (NPUs) offer high theoretical efficiency for edge AI, state-of-the-art Vision--Language Models (VLMs) tailored for GPUs often falter on these substrates. We attribute this hardware-model mismatch to two primary factors: the quantization brittleness of Vision Transformers (ViTs) and the I/O-bound nature of autoregressive attention mechanisms, which fail to utilize the high arithmetic throughput of NPUs. To bridge this gap, we propose AutoNeural, an NPU-native VLM architecture co-designed for integer-only inference. We replace the standard ViT encoder with a MobileNetV5-style backbone utilizing depthwise separable convolutions, which ensures bounded activation distributions for stable INT4/8/16 quantization. Complementing this, our language backbone integrates State-Space Model (SSM) principles with Transformer layers, employing efficient gated convolutions to achieve linear-time complexity. This hybrid design eliminates the heavy memory I/O overhead of Key-Value caching during generation. Our approach delivers substantial efficiency gains, reducing quantization error of vision encoder by up to 7x and end-to-end latency by 14x compared to conventional baselines. The AutoNeural also delivers 3x decoding speed and 4x longer context window than the baseline. We validate these improvements via a real-world automotive case study on the Qualcomm SA8295P SoC, demonstrating real-time performance for cockpit applications. Our results highlight that rethinking model topology specifically for NPU constraints is a prerequisite for robust multi-modal edge intelligence.

Multi-sensor fusion (MSF) is widely used in autonomous vehicles (AVs) for perception, particularly for 3D object detection with camera and LiDAR sensors. The purpose of fusion is to capitalize on the advantages of each modality while minimizing its weaknesses. Advanced deep neural network (DNN)-based fusion techniques have demonstrated the exceptional and industry-leading performance. Due to the redundant information in multiple modalities, MSF is also recognized as a general defence strategy against adversarial attacks. In this paper, we attack fusion models from the camera modality that is considered to be of lesser importance in fusion but is more affordable for attackers. We argue that the weakest link of fusion models depends on their most vulnerable modality, and propose an attack framework that targets advanced camera-LiDAR fusion-based 3D object detection models through camera-only adversarial attacks. Our approach employs a two-stage optimization-based strategy that first thoroughly evaluates vulnerable image areas under adversarial attacks, and then applies dedicated attack strategies for different fusion models to generate deployable patches. The evaluations with six advanced camera-LiDAR fusion models and one camera-only model indicate that our attacks successfully compromise all of them. Our approach can either decrease the mean average precision (mAP) of detection performance from 0.824 to 0.353, or degrade the detection score of a target object from 0.728 to 0.156, demonstrating the efficacy of our proposed attack framework. Code is available.

This study introduces a novel approach by replacing the traditional perceptron neuron model with a biologically inspired probabilistic meta neuron, where the internal neuron parameters are jointly learned, leading to improved classification accuracy of spiking neural networks (SNNs). To validate this innovation, we implement and compare two SNN architectures: one based on standard leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons and another utilizing the proposed probabilistic meta neuron model. As a second key contribution, we present a new biologically inspired classification framework that uniquely integrates SNNs with Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZC) a measure closely related to entropy rate. By combining the temporal precision and biological plausibility of SNNs with the capacity of LZC to capture structural regularity, the proposed approach enables efficient and interpretable classification of spatiotemporal neural data, an aspect not addressed in existing works. We consider learning algorithms such as backpropagation, spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), and the Tempotron learning rule. To explore neural dynamics, we use Poisson processes to model neuronal spike trains, a well-established method for simulating the stochastic firing behavior of biological neurons. Our results reveal that depending on the training method, the classifier's efficiency can improve by up to 11.00%, highlighting the advantage of learning additional neuron parameters beyond the traditional focus on weighted inputs alone.

Event-based cameras are attracting significant interest as they provide rich edge information, high dynamic range, and high temporal resolution. Many state-of-the-art event-based algorithms rely on splitting the events into fixed groups, resulting in the omission of crucial temporal information, particularly when dealing with diverse motion scenarios (\eg, high/low speed).In this work, we propose SpikeSlicer, a novel-designed plug-and-play event processing method capable of splitting events stream adaptively.SpikeSlicer utilizes a low-energy spiking neural network (SNN) to trigger event slicing. To guide the SNN to fire spikes at optimal time steps, we propose the Spiking Position-aware Loss (SPA-Loss) to modulate the neuron's state. Additionally, we develop a Feedback-Update training strategy that refines the slicing decisions using feedback from the downstream artificial neural network (ANN). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields significant performance improvements in event-based object tracking and recognition. Notably, SpikeSlicer provides a brand-new SNN-ANN cooperation paradigm, where the SNN acts as an efficient, low-energy data processor to assist the ANN in improving downstream performance, injecting new perspectives and potential avenues of exploration.

State-of-the-art systems neuroscience experiments yield large-scale multimodal data, and these data sets require new tools for analysis. Inspired by the success of large pretrained models in vision and language domains, we reframe the analysis of large-scale, cellular-resolution neuronal spiking data into an autoregressive spatiotemporal generation problem. Neuroformer is a multimodal, multitask generative pretrained transformer (GPT) model that is specifically designed to handle the intricacies of data in systems neuroscience. It scales linearly with feature size, can process an arbitrary number of modalities, and is adaptable to downstream tasks, such as predicting behavior. We first trained Neuroformer on simulated datasets, and found that it both accurately predicted simulated neuronal circuit activity, and also intrinsically inferred the underlying neural circuit connectivity, including direction. When pretrained to decode neural responses, the model predicted the behavior of a mouse with only few-shot fine-tuning, suggesting that the model begins learning how to do so directly from the neural representations themselves, without any explicit supervision. We used an ablation study to show that joint training on neuronal responses and behavior boosted performance, highlighting the model's ability to associate behavioral and neural representations in an unsupervised manner. These findings show that Neuroformer can analyze neural datasets and their emergent properties, informing the development of models and hypotheses associated with the brain.

Neural material representations are becoming a popular way to represent materials for rendering. They are more expressive than analytic models and occupy less memory than tabulated BTFs. However, existing neural materials are immutable, meaning that their output for a certain query of UVs, camera, and light vector is fixed once they are trained. While this is practical when there is no need to edit the material, it can become very limiting when the fragment of the material used for training is too small or not tileable, which frequently happens when the material has been captured with a gonioreflectometer. In this paper, we propose a novel neural material representation which jointly tackles the problems of BTF compression, tiling, and extrapolation. At test time, our method uses a guidance image as input to condition the neural BTF to the structural features of this input image. Then, the neural BTF can be queried as a regular BTF using UVs, camera, and light vectors. Every component in our framework is purposefully designed to maximize BTF encoding quality at minimal parameter count and computational complexity, achieving competitive compression rates compared with previous work. We demonstrate the results of our method on a variety of synthetic and captured materials, showing its generality and capacity to learn to represent many optical properties.

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable results in computer vision tasks. In the early days, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) were the mainstream architecture. In recent years, Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become increasingly popular. In addition, exploring applications of multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) has provided new perspectives for research into vision model architectures. In this paper, we present evMLP accompanied by a simple event-driven local update mechanism. The proposed evMLP can independently process patches on images or feature maps via MLPs. We define changes between consecutive frames as "events". Under the event-driven local update mechanism, evMLP selectively processes patches where events occur. For sequential image data (e.g., video processing), this approach improves computational performance by avoiding redundant computations. Through ImageNet image classification experiments, evMLP attains accuracy competitive with state-of-the-art models. More significantly, experimental results on multiple video datasets demonstrate that evMLP reduces computational cost via its event-driven local update mechanism while maintaining output consistency with its non-event-driven baseline. The code and trained models are available at https://github.com/i-evi/evMLP.

In recent years, Vision Transformers have attracted increasing interest from computer vision researchers. However, the advantage of these transformers over CNNs is only fully manifested when trained over a large dataset, mainly due to the reduced inductive bias towards spatial locality within the transformer's self-attention mechanism. In this work, we present a data-efficient vision transformer that does not rely on self-attention. Instead, it employs a novel generalization to multiple axes of the very recent Hyena layer. We propose several alternative approaches for obtaining this generalization and delve into their unique distinctions and considerations from both empirical and theoretical perspectives. Our empirical findings indicate that the proposed Hyena N-D layer boosts the performance of various Vision Transformer architectures, such as ViT, Swin, and DeiT across multiple datasets. Furthermore, in the small dataset regime, our Hyena-based ViT is favorable to ViT variants from the recent literature that are specifically designed for solving the same challenge, i.e., working with small datasets or incorporating image-specific inductive bias into the self-attention mechanism. Finally, we show that a hybrid approach that is based on Hyena N-D for the first layers in ViT, followed by layers that incorporate conventional attention, consistently boosts the performance of various vision transformer architectures.