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Zhaorui Wang

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2 papers

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

TDSNNs: Competitive Topographic Deep Spiking Neural Networks for Visual Cortex Modeling

Deming Zhou
Yuetong Fang
Zhaorui Wang
Renjing Xu

The primate visual cortex exhibits topographic organization, where functionally similar neurons are spatially clustered, a structure widely believed to enhance neural processing efficiency. While prior works have demonstrated that conventional deep ANNs can develop topographic representations, these models largely neglect crucial temporal dynamics. This oversight often leads to significant performance degradation in tasks like object recognition and compromises their biological fidelity. To address this, we leverage spiking neural networks (SNNs), which inherently capture spike-based temporal dynamics and offer enhanced biological plausibility. We propose a novel Spatio-Temporal Constraints (STC) loss function for topographic deep spiking neural networks (TDSNNs), successfully replicating the hierarchical spatial functional organization observed in the primate visual cortex from low-level sensory input to high-level abstract representations. Our results show that STC effectively generates representative topographic features across simulated visual cortical areas. While introducing topography typically leads to significant performance degradation in ANNs, our spiking architecture exhibits a remarkably small performance drop (No drop in ImageNet top-1 accuracy, compared to a 3% drop observed in TopoNet, which is the best-performing topographic ANN so far) and outperforms topographic ANNs in brain-likeness. We also reveal that topographic organization facilitates efficient and stable temporal information processing via the spike mechanism in TDSNNs, contributing to model robustness. These findings suggest that TDSNNs offer a compelling balance between computational performance and brain-like features, providing not only a framework for interpreting neural science phenomena but also novel insights for designing more efficient and robust deep learning models.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Gated Attention Coding for Training High-Performance and Efficient Spiking Neural Networks

Xuerui Qiu
Rui-jie Zhu
Yuhong Chou
Zhaorui Wang
Liang-Jian Deng
Guoqi Li

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are emerging as an energy-efficient alternative to traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs) due to their unique spike-based event-driven nature. Coding is crucial in SNNs as it converts external input stimuli into spatio-temporal feature sequences. However, most existing deep SNNs rely on direct coding that generates powerless spike representation and lacks the temporal dynamics inherent in human vision. Hence, we introduce Gated Attention Coding (GAC), a plug-and-play module that leverages the multi-dimensional gated attention unit to efficiently encode inputs into powerful representations before feeding them into the SNN architecture. GAC functions as a preprocessing layer that does not disrupt the spike-driven nature of the SNN, making it amenable to efficient neuromorphic hardware implementation with minimal modifications. Through an observer model theoretical analysis, we demonstrate GAC's attention mechanism improves temporal dynamics and coding efficiency. Experiments on CIFAR10/100 and ImageNet datasets demonstrate that GAC achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with remarkable efficiency. Notably, we improve top-1 accuracy by 3.10% on CIFAR100 with only 6-time steps and 1.07% on ImageNet while reducing energy usage to 66.9% of the previous works. To our best knowledge, it is the first time to explore the attention-based dynamic coding scheme in deep SNNs, with exceptional effectiveness and efficiency on large-scale datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/bollossom/GAC.

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