Advancing spatio-temporal processing through adaptation in spiking neural networks

Implementations of spiking neural networks on neuromorphic hardware promise orders of magnitude less power consumption than their non-spiking counterparts. The standard neuron model for spike-based computation on such systems has long been the leaky integrate-and-fire neuron. A computationally light augmentation of this neuron model with an adaptation mechanism has recently been shown to exhibit superior performance on spatio-temporal processing tasks. The root of the superiority of these so-called adaptive leaky integrate-and-fire neurons however is not well understood. In this article, we thoroughly analyze the dynamical, computational, and learning properties of adaptive leaky integrate-and-fire neurons and networks thereof. Our investigation reveals significant challenges related to stability and parameterization when employing the conventional Euler-Forward discretization for this class of models. We report a rigorous theoretical and empirical demonstration that these challenges can be effectively addressed by adopting an alternative discretization approach – the Symplectic Euler method, allowing to improve over state-of-the-art performances on common event-based benchmark datasets. Our further analysis of the computational properties of these networks shows that they are particularly well suited to exploit the spatio-temporal structure of input sequences without any normalization techniques.