SpikeMoE: Brain-Inspired Competitive Routing for Flexible Spiking Mixture-of-Experts

Abstract:Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) enable event-driven computation through biologically inspired dynamics at the neuronal scale, while Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) perform conditional computation through expert selection at the model scale. Integrating their strengths offers potential for flexible neural architectures. A key challenge, however, lies in designing an expert selection mechanism based on spiking activity. To address this, we introduce a spike-based k-WTA Router inspired by competition-inhibition observed in the hippocampal CA1 region. The router incorporates lateral inhibition and refractory period to select Top-K experts according to discrete spike counts. Building on this, we present SpikeMoE, a framework that integrates neuronal-scale spiking dynamics with model-scale expert selection. To address incomplete multisensory inputs in multimodal tasks, we further equip SpikeMoE with a two-stage missing-modality modeling module that combines empirical prototypes from an observed-modality pool with modality-specific learnable embeddings to construct missing-modality representations. Experiments on vision, language, and multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that SpikeMoE achieves state-of-the-art performance among the SNN baselines, matches or exceeds the performance of ANN counterparts, and maintains robustness across diverse missing-modality conditions. These results demonstrate a favorable trade-off between performance and energy efficiency, validating the integration of spiking dynamics with sparse expert computation and highlighting SpikeMoE as a promising approach to energy-efficient brain-inspired computing.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2610.01418 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2610.01418v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.01418 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.