Tackling Long-Tailed Data Challenges in Spiking Neural Networks via Heterogeneous Knowledge Distillation

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), inspired by the behavior of biological neurons, have gained significant research interest for resource-constrained edge devices and neuromorphic hardware due to their use of binary spike signals for inter-unit communication with low power consumption. However, the absence of research on spiking neural networks on long-tailed data has severely limited the deployment and application of this emerging network in practical scenarios. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a long-tail learning framework based on spiking neural networks, named LT-SpikingFormer, to alleviate the distribution bias between head and tail classes. LT-SpikingFormer adopts a widely trained Convolutional Neural Network to construct a heterogeneous knowledge distillation paradigm, offering balanced and reliable prior knowledge. Moreover, a multi-granularity hierarchical feature distillation objective is proposed to leverage cross-layer local features and network global predictions to facilitate refined information distillation to optimize the network, specifically for the performance of the tailed classes. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method performs well on several benchmark datasets.