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Smooth Exact Gradient Descent Learning in Spiking Neural Networks

Neurons and Cognition 2025-01-29 v2 Neural and Evolutionary Computing

Abstract

Gradient descent prevails in artificial neural network training, but seems inept for spiking neural networks as small parameter changes can cause sudden, disruptive (dis-)appearances of spikes. Here, we demonstrate exact gradient descent based on continuously changing spiking dynamics. These are generated by neuron models whose spikes vanish and appear at the end of a trial, where it cannot influence subsequent dynamics. This also enables gradient-based spike addition and removal. We illustrate our scheme with various tasks and setups, including recurrent and deep, initially silent networks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.14523,
  title  = {Smooth Exact Gradient Descent Learning in Spiking Neural Networks},
  author = {Christian Klos and Raoul-Martin Memmesheimer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.14523},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:32:11.368Z