SpArNet: Sparse Asynchronous Neural Network execution for energy efficient inference

Biological neurons are known to have sparse and asynchronous communications using spikes. Despite our incomplete understanding of processing strategies of the brain, its low energy consumption in fulfilling delicate tasks suggests the existence of energy efficient mechanisms. Inspired by these key factors, we introduce SpArNet, a bio-inspired quantization scheme to convert a pre-trained convolutional neural network to a spiking neural network, with the aim of minimizing the computational load for execution on neuromorphic processors. The proposed scheme has significant advantages over the reference CNN in a reduced number of synaptic operations, and can be used for frequent executions of inference tasks. The computational load of SpArNet is adjusted to the spatio-temporal dynamics of the the input data. We have tested the converted network on two applications (autonomous steering and hand gesture recognition), demonstrating a significant reduction on the number of required synaptic operations.