Incremental Neural Synthesis for Spiking Neural Networks

We present an iterative neural synthesis approach to train Convolutional Spiking Neural Networks for classification problems. Unlike previous neural synthesis methods which pri-marily compute the neuron firing rates, our method is designed to compute multiple spikes at arbitrary timings. As such, our approach is directly applicable to spatio-temporal problems using spiking network models. In our approach, each weight update is formulated as a linear Constraint Satisfaction Problem, which can then be solved using existing numerical techniques. On the MNIST, EMNIST, and ETH-80 image classification benchmarks, our approach demonstrates competitive with other models in the literature, while requiring relatively few training samples to converge to a good solution.