English

LAS: Loss-less ANN-SNN Conversion for Fully Spike-Driven Large Language Models

Machine Learning 2025-05-16 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

Spiking Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as an energy-efficient alternative to conventional LLMs through their event-driven computation. To effectively obtain spiking LLMs, researchers develop different ANN-to-SNN conversion methods by leveraging pre-trained ANN parameters while inheriting the energy efficiency of SNN. However, existing conversion methods struggle with extreme activation outliers and incompatible nonlinear operations of ANN-based LLMs. To address this, we propose a loss-less ANN-SNN conversion for fully spike-driven LLMs, termed LAS. Specifically, LAS introduces two novel neurons to convert the activation outlier and nonlinear operation of ANN-based LLMs. Moreover, LAS tailors the spike-equivalent Transformer components for spiking LLMs, which can ensure full spiking conversion without any loss of performance. Experimental results on six language models and two vision-language models demonstrate that LAS achieves loss-less conversion. Notably, on OPT-66B, LAS even improves the accuracy of 2\% on the WSC task. In addition, the parameter and ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of LAS. The source code is available at https://github.com/lc783/LAS

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.09659,
  title  = {LAS: Loss-less ANN-SNN Conversion for Fully Spike-Driven Large Language Models},
  author = {Long Chen and Xiaotian Song and Yanan Sun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.09659},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:33:30.199Z