Fast and deep neuromorphic learning with first-spike coding

Abstract

For a biological agent operating under environmental pressure, energy consumption and reaction times are of critical importance. Similarly, engineered systems also strive for short time-to-solution and low energy-to-solution characteristics. At the level of neuronal implementation, this implies achieving the desired results with as few and as early spikes as possible. In the time-to-first-spike coding framework, both of these goals are inherently emerging features of learning. Here, we describe a rigorous derivation of error-backpropagation-based learning for hierarchical networks of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons. This narrows the gap between previous existing models of first-spike-time learning and biological neuronal dynamics, thereby also enabling fast and energy-efficient inference on analog neuromorphic devices that inherit these dynamics from their biological archetypes.