# LitE-SNN: Designing Lightweight and Efficient Spiking Neural Network through Spatial-Temporal Compressive Network Search and Joint Optimization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.14652 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14652/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jan 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Towards Accurate Binary Spiking Neural Networks: Learning with Adaptive Gradient Modulation Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14344/) (2025)
- [Edge Intelligence with Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14069/) (2025)
- [NeuroNAS: Enhancing Efficiency of Neuromorphic In-Memory Computing for Intelligent Mobile Agents through Hardware-Aware Spiking Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00641/) (2024)
- [Toward Efficient Deep Spiking Neuron Networks:A Survey On Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08744/) (2024)
- [SPEAR: Structured Pruning for Spiking Neural Networks via Synaptic Operation Estimation and Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02945/) (2025)
- [SAFA-SNN: Sparsity-Aware On-Device Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning with Fast-Adaptive Structure of Spiking Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03648/) (2025)
- [Otters++: A Time-to-first-spike Based Energy Efficient Optical Spiking Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13016/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) mimic the information-processing mechanisms of the human brain and are highly energy-efficient, making them well-suited for low-power edge devices. However, the pursuit of accuracy in current studies leads to large, long-timestep SNNs, conflicting with the resource constraints of these devices. In order to design lightweight and efficient SNNs, we propose a new approach named LitE-SNN that incorporates both spatial and temporal compression into the automated network design process. Spatially, we present a novel Compressive Convolution block (CompConv) to expand the search space to support pruning and mixed-precision quantization. Temporally, we are the first to propose a compressive timestep search to identify the optimal number of timesteps under specific computation cost constraints. Finally, we formulate a joint optimization to simultaneously learn the architecture parameters and spatial-temporal compression strategies to achieve high performance while minimizing memory and computation costs. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Google Speech Command datasets demonstrate our proposed LitE-SNNs can achieve competitive or even higher accuracy with remarkably smaller model sizes and fewer computation costs.