Advancing Image Classification with Phase-coded Ultra-Efficient Spiking Neural Networks

Conventional surrogate Back-Propagation-Through-Time learning in Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) demands excessive energy consumption when simulating over extended time intervals. Moreover, the spike encoding process necessitates intricate hardware support, thus undermining overall efficiency. Additionally, their classification accuracies fall short in comparison to artificial neural networks due to the inherent information loss in spike translation. Therefore, there is a critical need for efficient techniques that can enhance performance without compromising accuracy. In this study, we introduce a novel learning scheme that harnesses lossless phase coding. This approach allows us to achieve minimal inference latency, requiring a maximum of at most 8 simulation steps. Furthermore, our training times exhibit significant reductions when compared to previous single-spike networks. Our experimental results demonstrate that Phase-SNN attains state-of-the-art accuracy levels, achieving 98.6% and 89.6% accuracies on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets, respectively.