# Breaking the Modality Wall: Time-step Mixup for Efficient Spiking Knowledge Transfer from Static to Event Domain

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12150 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12150/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00414/) (2019)
- [Visualizing the Loss Landscape of Neural Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09913/) (2017)
- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [High Speed and High Dynamic Range Video with an Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07165/) (2019)
- [Deep Residual Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04159/) (2021)
- [Converting Static Image Datasets to Spiking Neuromorphic Datasets Using Saccades](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.07629/) (2015)
- [DSEC: A Stereo Event Camera Dataset for Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06011/) (2021)
- [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)
- [The Multi Vehicle Stereo Event Camera Dataset: An Event Camera Dataset for 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10202/) (2018)
- [Going Deeper in Spiking Neural Networks: VGG and Residual Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02627/) (2018)
- [Temporal Efficient Training of Spiking Neural Network via Gradient Re-weighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11946/) (2022)
- [Events-to-Video: Bringing Modern Computer Vision to Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08298/) (2019)
- [Video to Events: Recycling Video Datasets for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03095/) (2019)
- [MixUp as Locally Linear Out-Of-Manifold Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02499/) (2018)
- [Scaling Spike-driven Transformer with Efficient Spike Firing Approximation Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16061/) (2024)
- [Neuromorphic Data Augmentation for Training Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06145/) (2022)
- [VLMixer: Unpaired Vision-Language Pre-training via Cross-Modal CutMix](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08919/) (2022)
- [Neural Dubber: Dubbing for Videos According to Scripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08243/) (2021)
- [TCJA-SNN: Temporal-Channel Joint Attention for Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10177/) (2022)
- [BrainCog: A Spiking Neural Network based Brain-inspired Cognitive Intelligence Engine for Brain-inspired AI and Brain Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08533/) (2022)
- [UCF-Crime-DVS: A Novel Event-Based Dataset for Video Anomaly Detection with Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12905/) (2025)
- [Temporal Knowledge Sharing enable Spiking Neural Network Learning from Past and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06540/) (2023)
- [Improving Stability and Performance of Spiking Neural Networks through Enhancing Temporal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14174/) (2023)
- [An Efficient Knowledge Transfer Strategy for Spiking Neural Networks from Static to Event Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13077/) (2023)
- [Cross Knowledge Distillation between Artificial and Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09269/) (2025)

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

- [Time Is All It Takes: Spike-Retiming Attacks on Event-Driven Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03284/) (2026)
- [Bringing BNNs to Fast Event Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09873/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The integration of event cameras and spiking neural networks (SNNs) promises energy-efficient visual intelligence, yet scarce event data and the sparsity of DVS outputs hinder effective training. Prior knowledge transfers from RGB to DVS often underperform because the distribution gap between modalities is substantial. In this work, we present Time-step Mixup Knowledge Transfer (TMKT), a cross-modal training framework with a probabilistic Time-step Mixup (TSM) strategy. TSM exploits the asynchronous nature of SNNs by interpolating RGB and DVS inputs at various time steps to produce a smooth curriculum within each sequence, which reduces gradient variance and stabilizes optimization with theoretical analysis. To employ auxiliary supervision from TSM, TMKT introduces two lightweight modality-aware objectives, Modality Aware Guidance (MAG) for per-frame source supervision and Mixup Ratio Perception (MRP) for sequence-level mix ratio estimation, which explicitly align temporal features with the mixing schedule. TMKT enables smoother knowledge transfer, helps mitigate modality mismatch during training, and achieves superior performance in spiking image classification tasks. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks and multiple SNN backbones, together with ablations, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.