Brain-inspired Evolutionary Architectures for Spiking Neural Networks

The intricate and distinctive evolutionary topology of the human brain enables it to execute multiple cognitive tasks simultaneously, and this automated evolutionary process of biological networks motivates our investigation into efficient architecture optimization for Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs). Diverging from traditional manual-designed and hierarchical Network Architecture Search (NAS), we advance the evolution of SNN architecture by integrating local, brain region-inspired modular structures with global cross-module connectivity. Locally, the brain region-inspired module consists of multiple neural motifs with excitatory and inhibitory connections; Globally, free connections among modules, including long-term cross-module feedforward and feedback connections are evolved. We introduce an efficient multi-objective evolutionary algorithm that leverages a few-shot predictor, endowing SNNs with high performance and low energy consumption. Extensive experiments across both static (CIFAR10, CIFAR100) and neuromorphic (CIFAR10-DVS, DVS128-Gesture) datasets reveal that the proposed model significantly exhibits robustness while maintaining consistent and exceptional performance. This study pioneers in searching for optimal neural architectures for SNNs by integrating the human brain’s advanced connectivity and modular organization into SNN optimization, thereby contributing valuable perspectives to the development of brain-inspired artificial intelligence. IEEE