Spiking Layer-Adaptive Magnitude-based Pruning

Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) provide energy-efficient computation but their deployment is constrained by dense connectivity and high spiking operation costs. Existing magnitude-based pruning strategies, when naively applied to SNNs, fail to account for temporal accumulation, non-uniform timestep contributions, and membrane stability, often leading to severe performance degradation. This paper proposes Spiking Layer-Adaptive Magnitude-based Pruning (SLAMP), a theory-guided pruning framework that generalizes layer-adaptive magnitude pruning to temporal SNNs by explicitly controlling worst-case output distortion across layers and timesteps. SLAMP formulates sparsity allocation as a temporal distortion-constrained optimization problem, yielding time-aware layer importance scores that reduce to conventional layer-adaptive pruning in single-timestep limit. An efficient two-stage procedure is derived, combining temporal score estimation, global sparsity allocation, and magnitude pruning with retraining for stability recovery. Experiments on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and the event-based CIFAR10-DVS datasets demonstrate that SLAMP achieves substantial connectivity and spiking operation reductions while preserving accuracy, enabling efficient and deployable SNN inference.