Aug 07, 2026
This work addresses the challenge of quantizing spiking neural networks (SNNs) under low-bit constraints, where membrane potentials are typically represented in floating-point format, leading to complex distributions and high sensitivity to threshold perturbations that hinder effective quantization and induce error accumulation. To overcome this, the authors propose a post-training quantization framework that jointly quantizes both weights and recurrent membrane potential states without requiring retraining, applicable to both convolutional SNNs and spiking-driven Transformers. The method introduces a channel-wise uniform scaling bridge to align the scales of membrane potentials and weights and employs a mixed-precision allocation strategy based on neuronal firing activity and quantization sensitivity, optimizing accuracy under an average bit-width budget. Experiments demonstrate that with weights quantized to 4 bits and membrane potentials to approximately 4 bits, the models maintain high accuracy on image classification and semantic segmentation tasks.