Modified spike backpropagation design towards highly parallelable hardware implementation

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Authors: Dayou Zhang, Yue Zhou, Vivian Zhao, Bin Gao, Jiawei Fu, Yibai Xue, Zhe Yang, Yi Li, Hao Tong, Xiangshui Miao, Yuhui He
Cited by: 1
References: 29

Abstract

This work presents a hardware-algorithm co-designed framework for neuromorphic computing, enabling efficient supervised learning in spike-based neural architectures. First, synaptic updates are reformulated as low-rank outer products of forward spike vectors and backward error gradients via singular value decomposition (SVD), enabling direct parallelization on 1T1R arrays. Second, a stochastic computing scheme replaces conventional sequential updates with probabilistic pulse-driven modulation, achieving one-step full-matrix synaptic updates. Third, gradient stabilization techniques mitigate training instability in deep SNNs by addressing silent neuron and gradient explosion issues. Evaluated on the ASL-DVS dynamic gesture recognition task, the framework maintains 84.7% accuracy with hardware-realistic 1T1R characteristics, while drastically reducing hardware update steps. This demonstrates a synergistic hardware-algorithm co-design where SVD-based approximation enables parallelization, stochastic computing achieves one-step updates, and gradient stabilization ensures trainability, advancing practical neuromorphic intelligence for edge sensing systems.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Advanced Memory and Neural Computing Neural Networks and Reservoir Computing Ferroelectric and Negative Capacitance Devices

Publication details

Journal / source
npj Unconventional Computing
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Volume
3
Issue
1
Publication date
22 January 2026
Language
EN