RMP-Loss: Regularizing Membrane Potential Distribution for Spiking
  Neural Networks
Yufei Guo Xiaode Liu Yuanpei Chen Liwen Zhang Weihang Peng Yuhan Zhang Xuhui Huang Zhe Ma
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) as one of the biology-inspired models have
received much attention recently. It can significantly reduce energy
consumption since they quantize the real-valued membrane potentials to 0/1
spikes to transmit information thus the multiplications of activations and
weights can be replaced by additions when implemented on hardware. However,
this quantization mechanism will inevitably introduce quantization error, thus
causing catastrophic information loss. To address the quantization error
problem, we propose a regularizing membrane potential loss (RMP-Loss) to adjust
the distribution which is directly related to quantization error to a range
close to the spikes. Our method is extremely simple to implement and
straightforward to train an SNN. Furthermore, it is shown to consistently
outperform previous state-of-the-art methods over different network
architectures and datasets.