提出新型稀疏剪枝框架,让脉冲神经网络更省电且易部署。
Sparse by Rule: Probability-Based N:M Pruning for Spiking Neural Networks
- 采用基于概率的半结构化剪枝,每4个权重最多保留2个非零值。
- 在2:4稀疏度下保持准确率甚至提升,且剪枝模式适配硬件加速。
- 受神经科学启发,通过时间累积奖励优化剪枝概率,稳定训练过程。
类脑脉冲神经网络(SNN)通过事件驱动、稀疏计算实现节能智能,但深层结构导致参数与计算开销增加,制约其边缘部署。现有剪枝方法分为两类:无结构剪枝虽可达高稀疏度但难以在通用硬件上加速;有结构剪枝虽利于部署却灵活性差且常在相同稀疏度下降低精度。本文提出首个面向SNN的半结构化N:M剪枝框架SpikeNM,从头学习稀疏SNN,强制每M个权重块中最多保留N个非零值。为避免组合复杂度随M指数增长,SpikeNM采用M路基底对数几率参数化与可微分Top-k采样器,将每块复杂度线性化至O(M),支持更激进的稀疏化。进一步受神经科学启发,提出‘资格感驱动蒸馏’(EID),将时间累积的奖励转化为块级软目标,使掩码概率与脉冲动态对齐,降低采样方差并稳定高稀疏度下的搜索。实验表明,在2:4稀疏度下,SpikeNM在主流数据集上保持甚至提升准确率,同时生成适配硬件的稀疏模式,与固有的脉冲稀疏性互补。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Brain-inspired Spiking neural networks (SNNs) promise energy-efficient intelligence via event-driven, sparse computation, but deeper architectures inflate parameters and computational cost, hindering their edge deployment. Recent progress in SNN pruning helps alleviate this burden, yet existing efforts fall into only two families: \emph{unstructured} pruning, which attains high sparsity but is difficult to accelerate on general hardware, and \emph{structured} pruning, which eases deployment but lack flexibility and often degrades accuracy at matched sparsity. In this work, we introduce \textbf{SpikeNM}, the first SNN-oriented \emph{semi-structured} \(N{:}M\) pruning framework that learns sparse SNNs \emph{from scratch}, enforcing \emph{at most \(N\)} non-zeros per \(M\)-weight block. To avoid the combinatorial space complexity \(\sum_{k=1}^{N}\binom{M}{k}\) growing exponentially with \(M\), SpikeNM adopts an \(M\)-way basis-logit parameterization with a differentiable top-\(k\) sampler, \emph{linearizing} per-block complexity to \(\mathcal O(M)\) and enabling more aggressive sparsification. Further inspired by neuroscience, we propose \emph{eligibility-inspired distillation} (EID), which converts temporally accumulated credits into block-wise soft targets to align mask probabilities with spiking dynamics, reducing sampling variance and stabilizing search under high sparsity. Experiments show that at \(2{:}4\) sparsity, SpikeNM maintains and even with gains across main-stream datasets, while yielding hardware-amenable patterns that complement intrinsic spike sparsity.
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