# Differentiable architecture search with multi-dimensional attention for spiking neural networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00902 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00902/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [Incorporating Learnable Membrane Time Constant to Enhance Learning of Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05785/) (2020)
- [Deep Residual Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04159/) (2021)
- [Going Deeper With Directly-Trained Larger Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05280/) (2020)
- [PC-DARTS: Partial Channel Connections for Memory-Efficient Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05737/) (2019)
- [Going Deeper in Spiking Neural Networks: VGG and Residual Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02627/) (2018)
- [Direct Training for Spiking Neural Networks: Faster, Larger, Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05793/) (2018)
- [Progressive Differentiable Architecture Search: Bridging the Depth Gap between Search and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12760/) (2019)
- [RMP-SNN: Residual Membrane Potential Neuron for Enabling Deeper High-Accuracy and Low-Latency Spiking Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01811/) (2020)
- [Fair DARTS: Eliminating Unfair Advantages in Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12126/) (2019)
- [Enabling Spike-based Backpropagation for Training Deep Neural Network Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06379/) (2019)
- [Optimal ANN-SNN Conversion for High-accuracy and Ultra-low-latency Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04347/) (2023)
- [Attention Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13929/) (2022)
- [Temporal-wise Attention Spiking Neural Networks for Event Streams Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11711/) (2021)
- [DARTS+: Improved Differentiable Architecture Search with Early Stopping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06035/) (2019)
- [Spiking Deep Networks with LIF Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.08829/) (2015)
- [Neural Architecture Search for Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10355/) (2022)
- [Weight-Sharing Neural Architecture Search: A Battle to Shrink the Optimization Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01475/) (2020)
- [Fast-SNN: Fast Spiking Neural Network by Converting Quantized ANN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19868/) (2023)
- [AutoSNN: Towards Energy-Efficient Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12738/) (2022)
- [Fast Neural Architecture Search of Compact Semantic Segmentation Models via Auxiliary Cells](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10804/) (2018)
- [A Neural Architecture Search based Framework for Liquid State Machine Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07864/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have gained enormous popularity in the field of artificial intelligence due to their low power consumption. However, the majority of SNN methods directly inherit the structure of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), usually leading to sub-optimal model performance in SNNs. To alleviate this problem, we integrate Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method and propose Multi-Attention Differentiable Architecture Search (MA-DARTS) to directly automate the search for the optimal network structure of SNNs. Initially, we defined a differentiable two-level search space and conducted experiments within micro architecture under a fixed layer. Then, we incorporated a multi-dimensional attention mechanism and implemented the MA-DARTS algorithm in this search space. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on classification compared to other methods under the same parameters with 94.40% accuracy on CIFAR10 dataset and 76.52% accuracy on CIFAR100 dataset. Additionally, we monitored and assessed the number of spikes (NoS) in each cell during the whole experiment. Notably, the number of spikes of the whole model stabilized at approximately 110K in validation and 100k in training on datasets.