PASCAL: Precise and Efficient ANN- SNN Conversion using Spike Accumulation and Adaptive Layerwise Activation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01730v1
• Date: Sat, 03 May 2025 07:55:29 GMT
• Title: PASCAL: Precise and Efficient ANN- SNN Conversion using Spike Accumulation and Adaptive Layerwise Activation
• Authors: Pranav Ramesh, Gopalakrishnan Srinivasan,
• Abstract summary: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been put forward as an energy-efficient alternative to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs)<n>ANN-SNN conversion is a widely used method to realize deep SNNs with accuracy comparable to that of ANNs.<n>In this work, we propose PASCAL, which performs ANN-SNN conversion in such a way that the resulting SNN is mathematically equivalent to an ANN with QCFS-activation.
• Score: 1.7889842797216122
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been put forward as an energy-efficient alternative to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) since they perform sparse Accumulate operations instead of the power-hungry Multiply-and-Accumulate operations. ANN-SNN conversion is a widely used method to realize deep SNNs with accuracy comparable to that of ANNs.~\citeauthor{bu2023optimal} recently proposed the Quantization-Clip-Floor-Shift (QCFS) activation as an alternative to ReLU to minimize the accuracy loss during ANN-SNN conversion. Nevertheless, SNN inferencing requires a large number of timesteps to match the accuracy of the source ANN for real-world datasets. In this work, we propose PASCAL, which performs ANN-SNN conversion in such a way that the resulting SNN is mathematically equivalent to an ANN with QCFS-activation, thereby yielding similar accuracy as the source ANN with minimal inference timesteps. In addition, we propose a systematic method to configure the quantization step of QCFS activation in a layerwise manner, which effectively determines the optimal number of timesteps per layer for the converted SNN. Our results show that the ResNet-34 SNN obtained using PASCAL achieves an accuracy of $\approx$74\% on ImageNet with a 64$\times$ reduction in the number of inference timesteps compared to existing approaches.

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