首个完全二值化脉冲语言模型,显著降低计算成本。
BiSpikCLM: A Spiking Language Model integrating Softmax-Free Spiking Attention and Spike-Aware Alignment Distillation

- 用无软最大化的脉冲注意力替代传统计算,避免浮点运算。
- 仅用5.6%训练数据量即达ANN性能,计算开销降至4.16%-5.87%。
- 适合追求低功耗、脑启发式NLP的部署场景。
脉冲神经网络(SNNs)因其事件驱动特性和极低功耗,为大语言模型(LLMs)提供了有前景的节能替代方案。然而,为保持模型容量,现有多数脉冲语言模型仍依赖大量浮点矩阵乘法(MatMul)和非线性操作,或面临由复杂时空动力学带来的训练难题。为此,我们提出首个全二值化脉冲矩阵乘法免去的因果语言模型——BiSpikCLM。该模型引入无软最大化的脉冲注意力(SFSA),在自回归语言建模中彻底消除软最大和浮点运算。为实现高效训练,提出脉冲感知对齐蒸馏(SpAD),在嵌入、注意力图、中间特征与输出逻辑斯蒂上对齐人工神经网络教师与脉冲神经网络学生。该框架使BiSpikCLM仅需极少训练样本(如1.3B模型仅需5.6%的训练令牌)即可达到与人工神经网络相当的性能。最终,其在自然语言生成任务上的计算成本仅为4.16%–5.87%。结果表明,全二值脉冲驱动的语言模型具备可行性与有效性,且蒸馏是脑启发式脉冲NLP的可行路径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer promising energy-efficient alternatives to large language models (LLMs) due to their event-driven nature and ultra-low power consumption. However, to preserve capacity, most existing spiking LLMs still incur intensive floating-point matrix multiplication (MatMul) and nonlinearities, or training difficulties arising from the complex spatiotemporal dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose BiSpikCLM, the first fully binary spiking MatMul-free causal language model. BiSpikCLM introduces Softmax-Free Spiking Attention (SFSA), eliminating softmax and floating-point operations in autoregressive language modeling. For efficient training, we introduce Spike-Aware Alignment Distillation (SpAD), which aligns ANN teacher and SNN student across embeddings, attention maps, intermediate features, and output logits. SpAD framework allows BiSpikCLM to reach comparable performance to ANN counterparts using substantially fewer training tokens (e.g., only 5.6% of the tokens for the 1.3B model). As a result, BiSpikCLM achieves competitive performance at only 4.16% - 5.87% of the computational cost on natural language generation tasks. Our results highlight the feasibility and effectiveness of fully binary spike-driven LLMs and establish the distillation as a promising pathway for brain-inspired spiking NLP.
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