Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are good candidates to produce ultra-energy-efficient hardware. However, the performance of these models is currently behind traditional methods. Introducing multi-layered SNNs is a promising way to reduce this gap. We propose in this paper a new threshold adaptation system which uses a timestamp objective at which neurons should fire. We show that our method leads to state-of-the-art classification rates on the MNIST dataset (98.60%) and the Faces/Motorbikes dataset (99.46%) with an unsupervised SNN followed by a linear SVM. We also investigate the sparsity level of the network by testing different inhibition policies and STDP rules.
@article{arxiv.1904.01908,
title = {Multi-layered Spiking Neural Network with Target Timestamp Threshold Adaptation and STDP},
author = {Pierre Falez and Pierre Tirilly and Ioan Marius Bilasco and Philippe Devienne and Pierre Boulet},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.01908},
year = {2019}
}