Temporal Knowledge Sharing Enable Spiking Neural Network Learning From Past and Future

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have attracted significant attention from researchers across various domains due to their brain-inspired information processing mechanism. However, SNNs typically grapple with challenges such as extended time steps, low temporal information utilization, and the requirement for consistent time step between testing and training. These challenges render SNNs with high latency. Moreover, the constraint on time steps necessitates the retraining of the model for new deployments, reducing adaptability. To address these issues, this article proposed a novel perspective, viewing the SNN as a temporal aggregation model. We introduced the temporal knowledge sharing (TKS) method, facilitating information interact between different time points. TKS can be perceived as a form of temporal self-distillation. To validate the efficacy of TKS in information processing, we tested it on static datasets such as CIFAR10, CIFAR100, ImageNet-1k, and neuromorphic datasets such as DVS-CIFAR10 and NCALTECH101. Experimental results demonstrated that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to other algorithms. Furthermore, TKS addresses the temporal consistency challenge, endowing the model with superior temporal generalization capabilities. This allows the network to train with longer time steps and maintain high performance during testing with shorter time steps. Such an approach considerably accelerates the deployment of SNNs on edge devices. Finally, we conducted ablation experiments and tested TKS on fine-grained tasks, with results showcasing TKS's enhanced capability to process information efficiently.