# Effects of Introducing Synaptic Scaling on Spiking Neural Network Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11261 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11261/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Spatio-Temporal Backpropagation for Training High-performance Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02609/) (2017)
- [Going Deeper in Spiking Neural Networks: VGG and Residual Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02627/) (2018)
- [Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks using Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08782/) (2016)
- [Temporal Spike Sequence Learning via Backpropagation for Deep Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10085/) (2020)
- [An Unsupervised STDP-based Spiking Neural Network Inspired By Biologically Plausible Learning Rules and Connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02727/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) employing unsupervised learning methods inspired by neural plasticity are expected to be a new framework for artificial intelligence. In this study, we investigated the effect of multiple types of neural plasticity, such as spike-time-dependent plasticity (STDP) and synaptic scaling, on the learning in a winner-take-all (WTA) network composed of spiking neurons. We implemented a WTA network with multiple types of neural plasticity using Python. The MNIST and the Fashion-MNIST datasets were used for training and testing. We varied the number of neurons, the time constant of STDP, and the normalization method used in synaptic scaling to compare classification accuracy. The results demonstrated that synaptic scaling based on the L2 norm was the most effective in improving classification performance. By implementing L2-norm-based synaptic scaling and setting the number of neurons in both excitatory and inhibitory layers to 400, the network achieved classification accuracies of 88.84 % on the MNIST dataset and 68.01 % on the Fashion-MNIST dataset after one epoch of training.