English

Spiker-LL: An Energy-Efficient FPGA Accelerator Enabling Adaptive Local Learning in Spiking Neural Networks

Neural and Evolutionary Computing 2026-05-19 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Deploying adaptive intelligence at the edge remains challenging due to the high computational and energy cost of training neural models. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising alternative, but enabling on-device learning requires hardware-algorithm co-design. This paper presents SPIKER-LL, an FPGA-based SNN accelerator that extends the open-source Spiker+ inference architecture with efficient support for the STSF local learning rule. Through targeted microarchitectural extensions, SPIKER-LL performs inference and online learning with minimal overhead. Across MNIST, F-MNIST, and DIGITS, it achieves up to 93% accuracy, sub-millisecond latency, and less than 0.1 mJ per inference, while remaining DSP-free and highly scalable for edge-FPGA deployments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.18003,
  title  = {Spiker-LL: An Energy-Efficient FPGA Accelerator Enabling Adaptive Local Learning in Spiking Neural Networks},
  author = {Alessio Caviglia and Filippo Marostica and Alessandro Savino and Stefano Di Carlo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.18003},
  year   = {2026}
}