# ESVAE: An Efficient Spiking Variational Autoencoder with Reparameterizable Poisson Spiking Sampling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.14839 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14839/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Going Deeper With Directly-Trained Larger Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05280/) (2020)
- [Spikformer: When Spiking Neural Network Meets Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15425/) (2022)
- [Direct Training for Spiking Neural Networks: Faster, Larger, Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05793/) (2018)
- [A Complete Survey on Generative AI (AIGC): Is ChatGPT from GPT-4 to GPT-5 All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11717/) (2023)
- [Unleashing the Power of Edge-Cloud Generative AI in Mobile Networks: A Survey of AIGC Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16129/) (2023)
- [A Fully Spiking Hybrid Neural Network for Energy-Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10719/) (2021)
- [Human-Level Control through Directly-Trained Deep Spiking Q-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07211/) (2021)
- [Fully Spiking Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00375/) (2021)
- [Learning to Time-Decode in Spiking Neural Networks Through the Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01177/) (2021)
- [VTAE: Variational Transformer Autoencoder with Manifolds Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00948/) (2023)
- [Spiking Generative Adversarial Network with Attention Scoring Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10246/) (2023)
- [Encoding Event-Based Data With a Hybrid SNN Guided Variational Auto-encoder in Neuromorphic Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00165/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Autonomous Driving with Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19687/) (2024)
- [Negative Binomial Variational Autoencoders for Overdispersed Latent Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05423/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, studies on image generation models of spiking neural networks (SNNs) have gained the attention of many researchers. Variational autoencoders (VAEs), as one of the most popular image generation models, have attracted a lot of work exploring their SNN implementation. Due to the constrained binary representation in SNNs, existing SNN VAE methods implicitly construct the latent space by an elaborated autoregressive network and use the network outputs as the sampling variables. However, this unspecified implicit representation of the latent space will increase the difficulty of generating high-quality images and introduces additional network parameters. In this paper, we propose an efficient spiking variational autoencoder (ESVAE) that constructs an interpretable latent space distribution and design a reparameterizable spiking sampling method. Specifically, we construct the prior and posterior of the latent space as a Poisson distribution using the firing rate of the spiking neurons. Subsequently, we propose a reparameterizable Poisson spiking sampling method, which is free from the additional network. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted, and the experimental results show that the proposed ESVAE outperforms previous SNN VAE methods in reconstructed & generated images quality. In addition, experiments demonstrate that ESVAE's encoder is able to retain the original image information more efficiently, and the decoder is more robust. The source code is available at https://github.com/QgZhan/ESVAE.