SPARTA: Advancing Sparse Attention in Spiking Neural Networks via Spike-Timing-Based Prioritization

Abstract: Current Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) underutilize the temporal dynamics inherent in spike-based processing, relying primarily on rate coding while overlooking precise timing information that provides rich computational cues. We propose SPARTA (Spiking Priority Attention with Resource-Adaptive Temporal Allocation), a framework that leverages heterogeneous neuron dynamics and spike-timing information to enable efficient sparse attention. SPARTA prioritizes tokens based on temporal cues, including firing patterns, spike timing, and inter-spike intervals, achieving 65.4% sparsity through competitive gating. By selecting only the most salient tokens, SPARTA reduces attention complexity from O(N^2) to O(K^2) with k << n, while maintaining high accuracy. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on DVS-Gesture (98.78%) and competitive results on CIFAR10-DVS (83.06%) and CIFAR-10 (95.3%), demonstrating that exploiting spike timing dynamics improves both computational efficiency and accuracy.