Modified spike backpropagation design towards highly parallelable hardware implementation
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.
Authors
- Yue Zhou (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1548-1284)
- Yibai Xue
- Jiawei Fu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3964-5992)
- Yuhui He
- Bin Gao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9993-1013)
- Dayou Zhang
- Hao Tong
- Vivian Zhao
- Zhe Yang
- Yi Li
- Xiangshui Miao
Institutions
- Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HK)
- Huazhong Agricultural University (CN)
- Institute of Microelectronics (CN)
- Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics (CN)
- Huazhong University of Science and Technology (CN)
- Tsinghua University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- npj Unconventional Computing
- Published
- 2026-01-22
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s44335-025-00046-0
- Primary Topic
- Advanced Memory and Neural Computing
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China