A Fast and Accurate ANN-SNN Conversion Algorithm with Negative Spikes

Abstract

Spiking neural network (SNN) is an event-driven neural network that can greatly reduce the power consumption of the conventional artificial neural networks (ANN). Many ANN models can be converted to SNN models when the activation function is ReLU. For ANN models with other activation functions, such as the Leaky ReLU function, the converted SNN models either suffer from serious accuracy degradation or require a long time step. In this paper, we propose a fast and accurate ANN-SNN conversion algorithm for models with the Leaky ReLU function. We design a novel neuron model that supports negative spikes. To address the problem of long tail distribution in the activation values, we propose a threshold optimization algorithm based on the variance of the activation values. To avoid the problem of error accumulation, we jointly calibrate all layers in the SNN model with adaptive weighting. Experiment results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.