Towards More Discriminative Feature Learning in SNNs with Temporal-Self-Erasing Supervision

Abstract

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are biologically inspired models that process visual inputs over multiple time steps. However, they often struggle with limited feature discrimination along the temporal dimension due to inherent spatiotemporal invariance. This limitation arises from the redundant activation of certain regions and shared supervision for multiple time steps, constraining the network’s ability to adapt and learn diverse features. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Temporal-Self-Erasing (TSE) supervision method that dynamically adapts the learning regions of interest for different time steps. The TSE method operates by identifying highly activated regions from predictions across multiple time steps and adaptively suppressing them during model training, thereby encouraging the network to focus on less activated yet potentially informative regions. This approach not only enhances the feature discrimination capability of SNNs but also facilitates more effective multi-time-step inference by exploiting more semantic information. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our TSE method significantly improves the classification accuracy and robustness of SNNs.