A new ANN-SNN conversion method with high accuracy, low latency and good robustness

Due to the advantages of low energy consumption, high robustness and fast inference speed, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), with good biological interpretability and the potential to be applied on neuromorphic hardware, are regarded as the third generation of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Despite having so many advantages, the biggest challenge encountered by spiking neural networks is training difficulty caused by the nondifferentiability of spike signals. ANN-SNN conversion is an effective method that solves the training difficulty by converting parameters in ANNs to those in SNNs through a specific algorithm. However, the ANN-SNN conversion method also suffers from accuracy degradation and long inference time. In this paper, we reanalyze the relationship between Integrate-and-Fire (IF) neuron model and ReLU activation function, propose a StepReLU activation function more suitable for SNNs under membrane potential encoding, and use it to train ANNs. Then we convert the ANNs to SNNs with extremely small conversion error and introduce leakage mechanism to the SNNs and get the final models, which have high accuracy, low latency and good robustness, and have achieved the state-of-the-art performance on various datasets such as CIFAR and ImageNet.