Topic: MNIST dataset

The timing of individual neuronal spikes is essential for biological brains to make fast responses to sensory stimuli. However, conventional artificial neural networks lack the intrinsic temporal coding ability present in biological networks. We propose a spiking neural network model that encodes information in the relative timing of individual neuron spikes. In classification tasks, the output of the network is indicated by the first neuron to spike in the output layer. This temporal coding scheme allows the supervised training of the network with backpropagation, using locally exact derivati

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) achieve remarkable results on various tasks, but understanding the computational mechanisms underlying their performance remains difficult. Furthermore, traditionally employed artificial networks have little in common with real biological networks. Overcoming this difference, machine-learning-based training methods for spiking neuronal networks (SNNs) have been developed to create functional networks, enabling the investigation of these neural networks with neuroscientific analysis methods. Here we analyze one such SNN trained with backpropagation based on a