Efficient speech command recognition leveraging spiking neural networks and progressive time-scaled curriculum distillation

The intrinsic dynamics and event-driven nature of spiking neural networks (SNNs) make them excel in processing temporal information by naturally utilizing embedded time sequences as time steps. Recent studies adopting this approach have demonstrated SNNs’ effectiveness in speech command recognition, achieving high performance by employing large time steps for long time sequences. However, the large time steps lead to increased deployment burdens for edge computing applications. Thus, it is important to balance high performance and low energy consumption when detecting temporal patterns in edge devices. Our solution comprises two key components. 1). We propose a high-performance fully spike-driven framework termed SpikeSCR, characterized by a global-local hybrid structure for efficient representation learning, which exhibits long-term learning capabilities with extended time steps. 2). To further fully embrace low energy consumption, we propose a progressive time-scaled curriculum distillation method (PTCD), where valuable representations learned from the easy curriculum are progressively transferred to the hard curriculum with minor loss, striking a trade-off between power efficiency and high performance. We evaluate our method on three benchmark datasets: the Spiking Heidelberg Dataset (SHD), the Spiking Speech Commands (SSC), and the Google Speech Commands (GSC) V2. Our experimental results demonstrate that SpikeSCR outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) SNNs across these three datasets with the same time steps. Furthermore, by executing PTCD, we reduce the number of time steps by 60% and decrease energy consumption by 54.8% while maintaining comparable performance to recent SOTA results. This work offers valuable insights for tackling temporal processing challenges with long time sequences in edge neuromorphic computing systems. The code is available at https://github.com/JackieWang9811/SpikeSCR.