Papers of the Week

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) present the potential for ultra-low-power computation, especially when implemented on dedicated neuromorphic hardware. However, a significant challenge is the efficient conversion of continuous real-world data into the discrete spike trains required by SNNs. In this paper, we introduce Learning Adaptive Spike Thresholds (LAST), a novel, trainable encoding strategy designed to address this challenge. The LAST encoder learns adaptive thresholds to transform continuous signals of varying dimensionality-ranging from time series data to high dimensional tensors-into sparse spike trains. Our proposed encoder effectively preserves temporal dynamics and adapts to the characteristics of the input. We validate the LAST approach in a demanding healthcare application using the EmoPain dataset. This dataset contains multimodal biosignal analysis for assessing chronic lower back pain (CLBP). Despite the dataset’s small sample size and class imbalance, our LAST-driven SNN framework achieves a competitive Matthews Correlation Coefficient of 0.44 and an accuracy of 80.43% in CLBP classification. The experimental results also indicate that the same framework can achieve an F1-score of 0.65 in detecting protective behaviour. Furthermore, the LAST encoder outperforms conventional rate and latency-based encodings while maintaining sparse spike representations. This achievement shows promises for energy-efficient and real-time biosignal processing in resource-limited environments.