A supervised multi-spike learning algorithm based on gradient descent for spiking neural networks.

We use a supervised multi-spike learning algorithm for spiking neural networks (SNNs) with temporal encoding to simulate the learning mechanism of biological neurons in which the SNN output spike trains are encoded by firing times. We first analyze why existing gradient-descent-based learning methods for SNNs have difficulty in achieving multi-spike learning. We then propose a new multi-spike learning method for SNNs based on gradient descent that solves the problems of error function construction and interference among multiple output spikes during learning. The method could be widely applied to single spiking neurons to learn desired output spike trains and to multilayer SNNs to solve classification problems. By overcoming learning interference among multiple spikes, our method has high learning accuracy when there are a relatively large number of output spikes in need of learning. We also develop an output encoding strategy with respect to multiple spikes for classification problems. This effectively improves the classification accuracy of multi-spike learning compared to that of single-spike learning.