# Spiking Patches: Asynchronous, Sparse, and Efficient Tokens for Event Cameras

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26614 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26614/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [Spatio-Temporal Backpropagation for Training High-performance Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02609/) (2017)
- [SLAYER: Spike Layer Error Reassignment in Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08646/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Learning of Representations for Asynchronous Event-Based Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08245/) (2019)
- [Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks using Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08782/) (2016)
- [Learning to Detect Objects with a 1 Megapixel Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13436/) (2020)
- [Recurrent Vision Transformers for Object Detection with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05598/) (2022)
- [AEGNN: Asynchronous Event-based Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17149/) (2022)
- [A Large Scale Event-based Detection Dataset for Automotive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08499/) (2020)
- [Event-based Asynchronous Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09148/) (2020)
- [State Space Models for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15584/) (2024)
- [Time-Ordered Recent Event (TORE) Volumes for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06108/) (2021)
- [GET: Group Event Transformer for Event-Based Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02642/) (2023)
- [EventNet: Asynchronous Recursive Event Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07045/) (2018)
- [Neuromorphic Data Augmentation for Training Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06145/) (2022)
- [From Chaos Comes Order: Ordering Event Representations for Object Recognition and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13455/) (2023)
- [Graph-based Asynchronous Event Processing for Rapid Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14419/) (2023)
- [Event Transformer. A sparse-aware solution for efficient event data processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03355/) (2022)
- [Scene Adaptive Sparse Transformer for Event-based Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01882/) (2024)
- [A Voxel Graph CNN for Object Classification with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00216/) (2021)
- [EventDrop: data augmentation for event-based learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05836/) (2021)

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

- [Parabolic Position Encoding: Vision-Centric, Principled, Extrapolatable, General](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01418/) (2026)
- [Neural Events: Discrete Asynchronous Autoencoders for Event-Based Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19835/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose tokenization of events and present a tokenizer, Spiking Patches, specifically designed for event cameras. Given a stream of asynchronous and spatially sparse events, our goal is to discover an event representation that preserves these properties. Prior works have represented events as frames or as voxels. However, while these representations yield high accuracy, both frames and voxels are synchronous and decrease the spatial sparsity. Spiking Patches gives the means to preserve the unique properties of event cameras and we show in our experiments that this comes without sacrificing accuracy. We evaluate our tokenizer using a GNN, PCN, and a Transformer on gesture recognition and object detection. Tokens from Spiking Patches yield inference times that are up to 3.4x faster than voxel-based tokens and up to 10.4x faster than frames. We achieve this while matching their accuracy and even surpassing in some cases with absolute improvements up to 3.8 for gesture recognition and up to 1.4 for object detection. Thus, tokenization constitutes a novel direction in event-based vision and marks a step towards methods that preserve the properties of event cameras.