2026
Otters: An Energy-Efficient Spiking Transformer via Optical Time-to-First-Spike Encoding
ICLR 2026poster
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) promise high energy efficiency, particularly with time-to-first-spike (TTFS) encoding, which maximizes sparsity by emitting at most one spike per neuron. However, such energy advantage is often unrealized because inference requires evaluating a temporal decay function…