Achieving Optimal Accuracy and Robustness Through Tight Excitatory–Inhibitory Balance in Shallow Spiking Recurrent Neural Network

Traditional deep neural networks exhibit high computational complexity during training and lack biological interpretability due to their reliance on backpropagation-based methods. Spiking Recurrent Neural Network (SRNN) performs well in processing spatio-temporal information by using discrete spike events. It attracts increasing attention in neural computing due to its biological plausibility and hardware implementation. To improve the performance of SRNN, we propose an excitation-inhibition balanced shallow SRNN (EI-SRNN), which is inspired by the balance of excitation and inhibition in the brain, by optimizing the input currents of reservoir neurons to achieve a tight balanced state. The proposed EI-SRNN achieves optimal accuracy while maintaining low computational complexity, debunking the conventional trade-off between accuracy and robustness. We analyze the neural encoding ability and information memory capacity of the EI-SRNN and compare the performance of the model under different degrees of excitation and inhibition. Our experiments demonstrate that EI-SRNN can have higher neural coding capacity and memory capacity under tight balanced excitatory and inhibitory balanced states, so it can achieve better accuracy while possessing stronger robustness. Furthermore, when the reservoir is dominated by excitatory influences, performance declines faster than when the reservoir is dominated by inhibitory influences.