arXiv:2511.00732v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are a promising, energy-efficient alternative to standard Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and are particularly well-suited to spatio-temporal tasks such as keyword spotting and video classification. However, SNNs have a much lower arithmetic intensity than ANNs and are therefore not well-matched to standard accelerators like GPUs and TPUs. Field Programmable Gate Arrays(FPGAs) are designed for such memory-bound workloads and here we develop a novel, fully-programmable RISC-V-based system-on-chip (FeNN-DMA), tailored to simulating SNNs on modern UltraScale+ FPGAs. We show that FeNN-DMA has comparable resource usage and energy requirements to state-of-the-art fixed-function SNN accelerators, yet it is capable of simulating much larger and more complex models. Using this functionality, we demonstrate state-of-the-art classification accuracy on the Spiking Heidelberg Digits and Neuromorphic MNIST tasks.
The Hidden Power of Normalization: Exponential Capacity Control in Deep Neural Networks
arXiv:2511.00958v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Normalization methods are fundamental components of modern deep neural networks (DNNs). Empirically, they are known to stabilize optimization dynamics and