DIET-SNN: A Low-Latency Spiking Neural Network With Direct Input Encoding and Leakage and Threshold Optimization

Bioinspired spiking neural networks (SNNs), operating with asynchronous binary signals (or spikes) distributed over time, can potentially lead to greater computational efficiency on event-driven hardware. The state-of-the-art SNNs suffer from high inference latency, resulting from inefficient input encoding and suboptimal settings of the neuron parameters (firing threshold and membrane leak). We propose DIET-SNN, a low-latency deep spiking network trained with gradient descent to optimize the membrane leak and the firing threshold along with other network parameters (weights). The membrane leak and threshold of each layer are optimized with end-to-end backpropagation to achieve competitive accuracy at reduced latency. The input layer directly processes the analog pixel values of an image without converting it to spike train. The first convolutional layer converts analog inputs into spikes where leaky-integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons integrate the weighted inputs and generate an output spike when the membrane potential crosses the trained firing threshold. The trained membrane leak selectively attenuates the membrane potential, which increases activation sparsity in the network. The reduced latency combined with high activation sparsity provides massive improvements in computational efficiency. We evaluate DIET-SNN on image classification tasks from CIFAR and ImageNet datasets on VGG and ResNet architectures. We achieve top-1 accuracy of 69% with five timesteps (inference latency) on the ImageNet dataset with 12x less compute energy than an equivalent standard artificial neural network (ANN). In addition, DIET-SNN performs 20-500x faster inference compared to other state-of-the-art SNN models.