Stable spike-timing dependent plasticity rule for multilayer unsupervised and supervised learning

Amar Shrestha, Khadeer Ahmed, Yanzhi Wang, Qinru Qiu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Entry/PoemConference contribution

35 Scopus citations

Abstract

Spike-Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP), the canonical learning rule for spiking neural networks (SNN), is gaining tremendous interest because of its simplicity, efficiency and biological plausibility. However, to date, multilayer feed-forward networks of spiking neurons are either only partially trained using STDP or pre-trained using traditional deep neural networks which are converted to deep spiking neural networks or a two-layer network where STDP learnt features are manually labelled. In this work, we present a low-cost, simplified, yet stable STDP rule for layer-wise unsupervised and supervised training of a multilayer feed-forward SNN. We propose to approximate Bayesian neuron using Stochastic Integrate and Fire (SIF) neuron model and introduce a supervised learning approach using teacher neurons to train the classification layer with one neuron per class. A SNN is trained for classification of handwritten digits with multiple layers of spiking neurons, including both the feature extraction and classification layer, using the proposed STDP rule. Our method achieves comparable to better accuracy on MNIST dataset than manually labelled two layer networks for the same sized hidden layer. We also analyze the parameter space to provide rationales for parameter fine-tuning and provide additional methods to improve noise resilience and input intensity variations. We further propose a Quantized 2-Power Shift (Q2PS) STDP rule, which reduces the implementation cost of digital hardware while achieves comparable performance.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2017 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IJCNN 2017 - Proceedings
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages1999-2006
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781509061815
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 30 2017
Event2017 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IJCNN 2017 - Anchorage, United States
Duration: May 14 2017May 19 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks
Volume2017-May

Other

Other2017 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IJCNN 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAnchorage
Period5/14/175/19/17

Keywords

  • Digit recognition
  • Quantized STDP
  • STDP
  • Spiking neural network
  • Supervised learning
  • Unsupervised learning

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Artificial Intelligence

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