Enhancing Representation of Spiking Neural Networks via Similarity-Sensitive Contrastive Learning

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have attracted intensive attention as a promising energy-efficient alternative to conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs) recently, which could transmit information in form of binary spikes rather than continuous activations thus the multiplication of activation and weight could be replaced by addition to save energy. However, the binary spike representation form will sacrifice the expression performance of SNNs and lead to accuracy degradation compared with ANNs. Considering improving feature representation is beneficial to training an accurate SNN model, this paper focuses on enhancing the feature representation of the SNN. To this end, we establish a similarity-sensitive contrastive learning framework, where SNN could capture significantly more information from its ANN counterpart to improve representation by Mutual Information (MI) maximization with layer-wise sensitivity to similarity. In specific, it enriches the SNN’s feature representation by pulling the positive pairs of SNN's and ANN's feature representation of each layer from the same input samples closer together while pushing the negative pairs from different samples further apart. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms the current state-of-the-art algorithms on both popular non-spiking static and neuromorphic datasets.