The Sparsity Ceiling: Where Spiking Networks Can and Cannot Trade Activity for Energy

Abstract:Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promoted as an energy-efficient substrate because sparse, event-driven activity replaces dense multiply-accumulates with cheap accumulates. We argue the energy dividend of sparsity is not a property of SNNs but of the task. Holding architecture fixed and swapping only the hidden unit (continuous vs. leaky-integrate-and-fire), plus a two-sided target-firing-rate probe, we measure how far activity can be pushed down before quality breaks. Low-load feed-forward perception sparsifies to 5% firing at no accuracy cost; a recurrent language model cannot go below ~50% -- the recurrent state must stay active to carry information. A spiking Transformer, by contrast, sparsifies freely to 2% (3 seeds) -- so the ceiling is a property of recurrent compression, not sequence modeling. Attention escapes the floor only by storing the full key-value cache, trading a firing floor for a memory wall: on neuromorphic hardware, recurrence and attention pay on different axes, neither escapes. We formalize the ceiling with an information-theoretic bound rho >= H_b^{-1}(log2 M / H) and confirm its predictions: the floor rises with memory load, falls with state width, and (refuting a naive memory-only reading) rises with task difficulty. A layer-wise input floor further caps op reduction under dense input, isolating event-driven perception as where neuromorphic hardware wins.

5 pages, 6 figures. Code: this https URL

Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2607.26648 [cs.NE]

(or arXiv:2607.26648v1 [cs.NE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.26648 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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