A structure-time parallel implementation of spike-based deep learning.

Abstract

Motivated by the recent progress of deep spiking neural networks (SNNs), we propose a structure-time parallel strategy based on layered structure and one-time computation over a time window to speed up the prominent spike-based deep learning algorithm named broadcast alignment. Furthermore, a well-designed deep hierarchical model based on the parallel broadcast alignment is proposed for object recognition. The parallel broadcast alignment achieves a significant 137× speedup compared to its original implementation on MNIST dataset. The object recognition model achieves higher accuracy than that of the latest spiking deep convolutional neural networks on the ETH-80 dataset. The proposed parallel strategy and the object recognition model will facilitate both the simulation of deep SNNs for studying spiking neural dynamics and also the applications of spike-based deep learning in real-world problems.