Brain‐Inspired Efficient Pruning: Exploiting Criticality in Spiking Neural Networks

ABSTRACT Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have gained significant attention due to their energy‐efficient and multiplication‐free characteristics. Despite these advantages, deploying large‐scale SNNs on edge hardware is challenging due to limited resource availability. Network pruning offers a viable approach to compress the network scale and reduce hardware resource requirements for model deployment. However, existing SNN pruning methods cause high pruning costs and performance loss because they lack efficiency in processing the sparse spike representation of SNNs. In this paper, inspired by the critical brain hypothesis in neuroscience and the high biological plausibility of SNNs, we explore and leverage criticality to facilitate efficient pruning in deep SNNs. We first explain criticality in SNNs from the perspective of maximizing feature information entropy. Second, we propose a low‐cost metric to assess neuron criticality in feature transmission and design a pruning‐regeneration method that incorporates this criticality into the pruning process. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves higher performance than the current state‐of‐the‐art (SOTA) method with up to 95.26% reduction in pruning cost. The criticality‐based regeneration process efficiently selects potential structures and facilitates consistent feature representation. Our code is available at https://github.com/MmPple/pruning‐criticality .