Associative memory of phase-coded spatiotemporal patterns in leaky Integrate and Fire networks

We study the collective dynamics of a Leaky Integrate and Fire network in which precise relative phase relationship of spikes among neurons are stored, as attractors of the dynamics, and selectively replayed at differentctime scales. Using an STDP-based learning process, we store in the connectivity several phase-coded spike patterns, and we find that, depending on the excitability of the network, different working regimes are possible, with transient or persistent replay activity induced by a brief signal. We introduce an order parameter to evaluate the similarity between stored and recalled phase-coded pattern, and measure the storage capacity. Modulation of spiking thresholds during replay changes the frequency of the collective oscillation or the number of spikes per cycle, keeping preserved the phases relationship. This allows a coding scheme in which phase, rate and frequency are dissociable. Robustness with respect to noise and heterogeneity of neurons parameters is studied, showing that, since dynamics is a retrieval process, neurons preserve stablecprecise phase relationship among units, keeping a unique frequency of oscillation, even in noisy conditions and with heterogeneity of internal parameters of the units

SpikeTemp: an enhanced rank-order-based learning approach for spiking neural networks with adaptive structure

This paper presents an enhanced rank - order based learning algorithm, called SpikeTemp, for Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) with a dynamically adaptive structure. The trained feed-forward SNN consists of two layers of spiking neurons: an encoding layer which temporally encodes real valued features into spatio-temporal spike patterns, and an output layer of dynamically grown neurons which perform spatio-temporal classification. Both Gaussian receptive fields and square cosine population encoding schemes are employed to encode real-valued features into spatio-temporal spike patterns. Unlike the rank-order based learning approach, SpikeTemp uses the precise times of the incoming spikes for adjusting the synaptic weights such that early spikes result in a large weight change and late spikes lead to a smaller weight change. This removes the need to rank all the incoming spikes and thus reduces the computational cost of SpikeTemp. The proposed SpikeTemp algorithm is demonstrated on several benchmark datasets and on an image recognition task. The results show that SpikeTemp can achieve better classification performance and is much faster than the existing rank-order based learning approach. In addition, the number of output neurons is much smaller when the square cosine encoding scheme is employed. Furthermore, SpikeTemp is benchmarked against a selection of existing machine learning algorithms and the results demonstrate the ability of SpikeTemp to classify different datasets after just one presentation of the training samples with comparable classification performance