Adaptive Fission: Post-training Encoding for Low-latency Spike Neural Networks

Yizhou Jiang, Feng Chen, Yihan Li, Yuqian Liu, Haichuan Gao, Tianren Zhang, Ying Fang

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) often rely on rate coding, where high-precision inference depends on long time-steps, leading to significant latency and energy cost—especially for ANN-to-SNN conversions. To address this, we propose Adaptive Fission, a post-training encoding technique that selectively splits high-sensitivity neurons into groups with varying scales and weights. This enables neuron-specific, on-demand precision and threshold allocation while introducing minimal spatial overhead. As a generalized form of population coding, it seamlessly applies to a wide range of pretrained SNN architectures without requiring additional training or fine-tuning. Experiments on neuromorphic hardware demonstrate up to 80\% reductions in latency and power consumption without degrading accuracy.