This repository contains the corresponding code from the paper Jason K. Eshraghian, Corey Lammie, Mostafa Rahimi Azghadi, and Wei D. Lu "Navigating Local Minima in Quantized Spiking Neural Networks". https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.07221, February 2022.

Illustrations of the key concepts of the paper: Periodic scheduling can enable SNNs to overcome flat surfaces and local minima. When the LR is boosted during training using a cyclic scheduler, it is given another chance to reduce the loss with different initial conditions. While the loss appears to converge, subsequent LR boosting enables it to traverse more optimal solutions.

If you find this code useful in your work, please cite the following source:

@article{eshraghian2022navigating,
  title={{Navigating Local Minima in Quantized Spiking Neural Networks}},
  author={Eshraghian, Jason K and Lammie, Corey and Rahimi Azghadi, Mostafa and Lu, Wei D},
  year={2022},
  eprint={2202.07221},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
}

We provide a Jupyter notebook here, which includes documentation and information about our developed scripts and methodologies. This can be run in a Google Collaboratory environment without any prerequisites here.

For more advanced users, i.e., those proficient with Python, we provide executable code in the form of Python scripts. Simulations can be run by configuring and executing run.py in each respective dataset directory.

To run the Jupyter notebook, Google Colab can be used. Otherwise, a working Python (≥3.6) interpreter and the pip package manager are required.

To run all standalone scripts, a working Python (≥3.6) interpreter and the pip package manager. All required libraries and packages can be installed using pip install -r requirements.txt. To avoid potential package conflicts, the use of a conda environment is recommended. The following commands can be used to create and activate a separate conda environment, clone this repository, and to install all dependencies:

conda create -n QSNNs python=3.8
conda activate QSNNs
git clone https://github.com/jeshraghian/QSNNs.git
cd QSNNs
pip install -r requirements.txt

• In each directory, within run.py files, the config dictionary defines all configuration parameters and parameters for each dataset.
• The default parameters in this repo are identical to those for the Q4 cosine anneling learning rate schedule configurations reported in the corresponding paper.

• Results can be gathered and plotted using extract_test_set_accuracy.py and plot_results.py, respectively.
• plot_results.py can be reconfigured to plot different quantities.
• By default, plot_results.py plots the loss curve evolution during training for all three datasets.