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SpikeGPT: Generative Pre-trained Language Model with Spiking Neural Networks

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arxiv 2302.13939 v5 pith:WCKJZ6VB submitted 2023-02-27 cs.CL cs.LGcs.NE

SpikeGPT: Generative Pre-trained Language Model with Spiking Neural Networks

classification cs.CL cs.LGcs.NE
keywords modellanguagespikegptsnnscomputationalevent-drivenmodelsspiking
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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As the size of large language models continue to scale, so does the computational resources required to run it. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as an energy-efficient approach to deep learning that leverage sparse and event-driven activations to reduce the computational overhead associated with model inference. While they have become competitive with non-spiking models on many computer vision tasks, SNNs have also proven to be more challenging to train. As a result, their performance lags behind modern deep learning, and we are yet to see the effectiveness of SNNs in language generation. In this paper, inspired by the Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) language model, we successfully implement `SpikeGPT', a generative language model with binary, event-driven spiking activation units. We train the proposed model on two model variants: 45M and 216M parameters. To the best of our knowledge, SpikeGPT is the largest backpropagation-trained SNN model to date, rendering it suitable for both the generation and comprehension of natural language. We achieve this by modifying the transformer block to replace multi-head self attention to reduce quadratic computational complexity O(N^2) to linear complexity O(N) with increasing sequence length. Input tokens are instead streamed in sequentially to our attention mechanism (as with typical SNNs). Our preliminary experiments show that SpikeGPT remains competitive with non-spiking models on tested benchmarks, while maintaining 20x fewer operations when processed on neuromorphic hardware that can leverage sparse, event-driven activations. Our code implementation is available at https://github.com/ridgerchu/SpikeGPT.

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Forward citations

Cited by 10 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. LongSpike: Fractional Order Spiking State Space Models for Efficient Long Sequence Learning

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    LongSpike integrates fractional-order state-space modeling into spiking neural networks, enabling better long-sequence performance than prior SNNs on LRA, WikiText-103, and Speech Commands benchmarks while retaining s...

  2. Attention by Synchronization in Coupled Oscillator Networks

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Kuramoto synchronization dynamics implement a provably unique and globally attractive attention mechanism that replaces softmax for physical substrates and shows competitive empirical performance.

  3. Affinity Is Not Enough: Recovering the Free Energy Principle in Mixture-of-Experts

    cs.LG 2026-05 conditional novelty 7.0

    Adding temporal memory via LIF, precision-weighted gating, and anticipatory prediction to MoE routers recovers effective expert selection at distribution transitions, with ablation confirming a super-additive beta-ant...

  4. Winner-Take-All Spiking Transformer for Language Modeling

    cs.NE 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Winner-take-all spiking self-attention replaces softmax in spiking transformers to support language modeling on 16 datasets with spike-driven, energy-efficient architectures.

  5. Plug-and-Play Spiking Operators: Breaking the Nonlinearity Bottleneck in Spiking Transformers

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A modular framework decomposes Transformer nonlinearities into spike-compatible primitives realized via LIF population coding and bit-shift scaling, supporting Softmax, SiLU, and normalization with under 1% accuracy d...

  6. BiSpikCLM: A Spiking Language Model integrating Softmax-Free Spiking Attention and Spike-Aware Alignment Distillation

    cs.NE 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    BiSpikCLM is the first fully binary spiking MatMul-free causal language model that matches ANN performance on generation tasks using only 4-6 percent of the compute via softmax-free spiking attention and spike-aware d...

  7. SpikeLogBERT: Energy-Efficient Log Parsing Using Spiking Transformer Networks

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    SpikeLogBERT achieves 0.99997 parsing accuracy on HDFS logs while cutting estimated energy use by 62.6% versus standard neural models through spiking transformer computation and BERT distillation.

  8. Spike-Aware C++ INT8 Inference for Sparse Spiking Language Models on Commodity CPUs

    cs.NE 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A spike-aware C++ INT8 runtime for sparse spiking LMs delivers 22.63 tokens/s single-thread on Ryzen 7, beating several Q8_0 dense models in llama.cpp while cutting weights from 3.49 GB to 1.06 GB, at the cost of high...

  9. Adaptive Spiking Neurons for Vision and Language Modeling

    cs.NE 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    ASN uses trainable parameters for adaptive membrane dynamics and firing in SNNs, with NASN adding normalization, and reports effectiveness across 19 vision and language datasets.

  10. SpikingMamba: Towards Energy-Efficient Large Language Models via Knowledge Distillation from Mamba

    cs.NE 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    SpikingMamba distills Mamba into an SNN LLM achieving 4.76x energy savings with a 4.78% zero-shot accuracy gap that narrows to 2.23% after RL.