Spiking Diffusion Models

Recent years have witnessed spiking neural networks (SNNs) gaining attention for their ultra-low energy consumption and high biological plausibility compared with traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs). Despite their distinguished properties, the application of SNNs in the computationally intensive field of image generation is still under exploration. In this article, we propose the spiking diffusion models (SDMs), an innovative family of SNN-based generative models that excel in producing high-quality samples with significantly reduced energy consumption. In particular, we propose a temporal-wise spiking mechanism (TSM) that allows SNNs to capture more temporal features from a bio-plasticity perspective. In addition, we propose a threshold-guided strategy that can further improve the performances by up to 16.7% without any additional training. We also make the first attempt to use the ANN-SNN approach for SNN-based generation tasks. Extensive experimental results reveal that our approach not only exhibits comparable performance to its ANN counterpart with few spiking time steps, but also outperforms previous SNN-based generative models by a large margin. Moreover, we also demonstrate the high-quality generation ability of SDM on large-scale datasets, e.g., LSUN bedroom. This development marks a pivotal advancement in the capabilities of SNN-based generation, paving the way for future research avenues to realize low-energy and low-latency generative applications.