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Fast and energy-efficient neuromorphic deep learning with first-spike times

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 3, pages 823–835 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

For a biological agent operating under environmental pressure, energy consumption and reaction times are of critical importance. Similarly, engineered systems are optimized for short time-to-solution and low energy-to-solution characteristics. At the level of neuronal implementation, this implies achieving the desired results with as few and as early spikes as possible. With time-to-first-spike coding, both of these goals are inherently emerging features of learning. Here, we describe a rigorous derivation of a learning rule for such first-spike times in networks of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons, relying solely on input and output spike times, and show how this mechanism can implement error backpropagation in hierarchical spiking networks. Furthermore, we emulate our framework on the BrainScaleS-2 neuromorphic system and demonstrate its capability of harnessing the system’s speed and energy characteristics. Finally, we examine how our approach generalizes to other neuromorphic platforms by studying how its performance is affected by typical distortive effects induced by neuromorphic substrates.

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Fig. 1: Time-to-first-spike coding and learning.
Fig. 2: Classification of the Yin-Yang dataset.
Fig. 3: Classification of the MNIST dataset.
Fig. 4: Classification on the BrainScaleS-2 neuromorphic platform.
Fig. 5: Effects of substrate imperfections.

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Data availability

We used the MNIST66 and the Yin-Yang dataset65. For the latter, see https://github.com/lkriener/yin_yang_data_set.

Code availability

Code for the simulations81 is available at https://github.com/JulianGoeltz/fastAndDeep.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Jordan and N. Gürtler for valuable discussions, S. Schmitt for assistance with BrainScaleS-1, V. Karasenko, P. Spilger and Y. Stradmann for taming physics, as well as M. Davies and Intel for their ongoing support (L.K., W.S., M.A.P.). Some calculations were performed on UBELIX, the HPC cluster at the University of Bern. Our work has greatly benefitted from access to the Fenix Infrastructure resources, which are partially funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme through the ICEI project under grant agreement no. 800858. Some simulations were performed on the bwForCluster NEMO, supported by the state of Baden–Württemberg through bwHPC and the German Research Foundation (DFG) through grant no. INST 39/963-1 FUGG. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the European Union for the Human Brain Project under grant agreements 604102 (J.S., K.M., M.A.P.), 720270 (S.B., O.B., B.C., J.S., K.M., M.A.P.), 785907 (S.B., O.B., B.C., W.S., J.S., K.M., M.A.P.), 945539 (L.K., A.B., S.B., O.B., B.C., W.S., J.S., M.A.P.) and the Manfred Stärk Foundation (J.G., A.B., D.D., A.F.K., K.M., M.A.P.).

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  1. These authors contributed equally: J. Göltz, L. Kriener.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kirchhoff-Institute for Physics, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany

    J. Göltz, A. Baumbach, S. Billaudelle, O. Breitwieser, B. Cramer, D. Dold, A. F. Kungl, J. Schemmel, K. Meier & M. A. Petrovici

  2. Department of Physiology, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    J. Göltz, L. Kriener, W. Senn & M. A. Petrovici

  3. Siemens AI lab, Siemens AG Technology, Munich, Germany

    D. Dold

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Contributions

J.G., A.B. and M.A.P. designed the conceptual and experimental approach. J.G. derived the theory, implemented the algorithm and performed the hardware experiments. L.K. embedded the algorithm into a comprehensive training framework and performed the simulation experiments. A.B. and O.B. offered substantial software support. S.B., B.C., J.G. and A.F.K. provided low-level software for interfacing with the hardware. J.G., L.K., D.D., S.B. and M.A.P. wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to J. Göltz, L. Kriener or M. A. Petrovici.

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Supplementary text with sections SI.A to SI.F, six figures (SI.A1, SI.C1, SI.D1, SI.E1, SI.E2, SI.F1) and four tables (SI.B1, SI.F1-3).

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Göltz, J., Kriener, L., Baumbach, A. et al. Fast and energy-efficient neuromorphic deep learning with first-spike times. Nat Mach Intell 3, 823–835 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00388-x

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