Spike-Aware Gradient-Based Mixed-Precision Quantization of Spiking Neural Networks for Vision Applications

Computer Science > Machine Learning

[Submitted on 21 Oct 2026]

Title:Spike-Aware Gradient-Based Mixed-Precision Quantization of Spiking Neural Networks for Vision Applications

View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:In recent years, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have gained massive attention as an energy-efficient neural computing paradigm due to their event-driven and sparse computing capability. However, maintaining accuracy under low-precision constraints, necessary for practical deployment, has been largely unexplored for SNN models. In addition, existing Hessian-based approaches for quantization, such as HAWQ-V2, incur significant memory and computational overhead due to temporal unrolling across multiple SNN timesteps. We propose a spike-aware gradient-based mixed-precision quantization framework for SNNs that adaptively assigns bit-widths using first-order gradient information, avoiding costly second-order Hessian computations. We evaluate our method across various SNN-based architectures, including VGG, ResNet, and Vision Transformer models obtained from both ANN-to-SNN conversion and direct training frameworks, on CIFAR10/100, ImageNet, and DVS-CIFAR-10 datasets. Notably, on ResNet-34 evaluated on ImageNet, our method achieves 73.30% accuracy at 4.78$\times$ compression, which is comparable to that provided by HAWQ-V2, while reducing memory consumption by 2.31$\times$ and bit-allocation runtime by 100$\times$. We also present an energy analysis for mixed-precision SNNs showing that the proposed quantization strategy enables energy-efficient deployment without compromising performance.

Submission history

From: Gopalakrishnan Srinivasan [view email][v1] Wed, 21 Oct 2026 18:58:52 UTC (4,901 KB)

Additional Features

References & Citations

Loading...

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)

Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)

Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)

scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)

CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)

DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)

Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)

Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)

ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)

Demos

Recommenders and Search Tools

Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)

CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)

IArxiv Recommender

(What is IArxiv?)

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.