# All in one timestep: Enhancing Sparsity and Energy efficiency in Multi-level Spiking Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24637 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24637/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Surrogate Gradient Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09948/) (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)
- [Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks using Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08782/) (2016)
- [Spiking-YOLO: Spiking Neural Network for Energy-Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06530/) (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)
- [A Free Lunch From ANN: Towards Efficient, Accurate Spiking Neural Networks Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06984/) (2021)
- [Training High-Performance Low-Latency Spiking Neural Networks by Differentiation on Spike Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00459/) (2022)
- [Advancing Spiking Neural Networks towards Deep Residual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08954/) (2021)
- [Optimal ANN-SNN Conversion for Fast and Accurate Inference in Deep Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11654/) (2021)
- [An Analytical Estimation of Spiking Neural Networks Energy Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13107/) (2022)
- [Ternary Spike: Learning Ternary Spikes for Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06372/) (2023)
- [Multi-Level Firing with Spiking DS-ResNet: Enabling Better and Deeper Directly-Trained Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06386/) (2022)
- [An Exact Mapping From ReLU Networks to Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.12522/) (2022)
- [MT-SNN: Enhance Spiking Neural Network with Multiple Thresholds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11127/) (2023)
- [Directly Training Temporal Spiking Neural Network with Sparse Surrogate Gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19645/) (2024)
- [Multi-Bit Mechanism: A Novel Information Transmission Paradigm for Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05739/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are one of the most promising bio-inspired neural networks models and have drawn increasing attention in recent years. The event-driven communication mechanism of SNNs allows for sparse and theoretically low-power operations on dedicated neuromorphic hardware. However, the binary nature of instantaneous spikes also leads to considerable information loss in SNNs, resulting in accuracy degradation. To address this issue, we propose a multi-level spiking neuron model able to provide both low-quantization error and minimal inference latency while approaching the performance of full precision Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Experimental results with popular network architectures and datasets, show that multi-level spiking neurons provide better information compression, allowing therefore a reduction in latency without performance loss. When compared to binary SNNs on image classification scenarios, multi-level SNNs indeed allow reducing by 2 to 3 times the energy consumption depending on the number of quantization intervals. On neuromorphic data, our approach allows us to drastically reduce the inference latency to 1 timestep, which corresponds to a compression factor of 10 compared to previously published results. At the architectural level, we propose a new residual architecture that we call Sparse-ResNet. Through a careful analysis of the spikes propagation in residual connections we highlight a spike avalanche effect, that affects most spiking residual architectures. Using our Sparse-ResNet architecture, we can provide state-of-the-art accuracy results in image classification while reducing by more than 20% the network activity compared to the previous spiking ResNets.