BackEISNN: A Deep Spiking Neural Network with Adaptive Self-Feedback and Balanced Excitatory-Inhibitory Neurons

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) transmit information through discrete spikes, which performs well in processing spatial-temporal information. Due to the non-differentiable characteristic, there still exist difficulties in designing well-performed SNNs. Recently, SNNs trained with backpropagation have shown superior performance due to the proposal of the gradient approximation. However, the performance on complex tasks is still far away from the deep neural networks. Taking inspiration from the autapse in the brain which connects the spiking neurons with a self-feedback connection, we apply an adaptive time-delayed self-feedback on the membrane potential to regulate the spike precisions. As well as, we apply the balanced excitatory and inhibitory neurons mechanism to control the spiking neurons' output dynamically. With the combination of the two mechanisms, we propose a deep spiking neural network with adaptive self-feedback and balanced excitatory and inhibitory neurons (BackEISNN). The experimental results on several standard datasets have shown that the two modules not only accelerate the convergence of the network but also improve the accuracy. For the MNIST, FashionMNIST, and N-MNIST datasets, our model has achieved state-of-the-art performance. For the CIFAR10 dataset, our BackEISNN also gets remarkable performance on a relatively light structure that competes against state-of-the-art SNNs.