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DendroNN: Dendrocentric Neural Networks for Energy-Efficient Classification of Event-Based Data

arXiv cs.LG / 3/11/2026

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Key Points

  • DendroNN is a novel dendrocentric neural network inspired by dendritic sequence detection in the brain, designed for energy-efficient classification of event-based data.
  • The network identifies unique spike sequences as spatiotemporal features and trains without gradients via a rewiring phase that memorizes frequent sequences and discards non-discriminative ones.
  • An asynchronous digital hardware architecture leveraging DendroNN’s dynamic/static sparsity and intrinsic quantization achieves up to 4x higher efficiency compared to state-of-the-art neuromorphic hardware on audio classification tasks.
  • DendroNN avoids energy-inefficient recurrence or delay-based temporal computations common in existing spiking neural networks, making it suitable for low-power, event-driven spatiotemporal processing.
  • The approach shows competitive accuracy on various event-based time series datasets, demonstrating its promise for future neuromorphic and energy-efficient sensory computing applications.

Computer Science > Machine Learning

arXiv:2603.09274 (cs)
[Submitted on 10 Mar 2026]

Title:DendroNN: Dendrocentric Neural Networks for Energy-Efficient Classification of Event-Based Data

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Abstract:Spatiotemporal information is at the core of diverse sensory processing and computational tasks. Feed-forward spiking neural networks can be used to solve these tasks while offering potential benefits in terms of energy efficiency by computing event-based. However, they have trouble decoding temporal information with high accuracy. Thus, they commonly resort to recurrence or delays to enhance their temporal computing ability which, however, bring downsides in terms of hardware-efficiency. In the brain, dendrites are computational powerhouses that just recently started to be acknowledged in such machine learning systems. In this work, we focus on a sequence detection mechanism present in branches of dendrites and translate it into a novel type of neural network by introducing a dendrocentric neural network, DendroNN. DendroNNs identify unique incoming spike sequences as spatiotemporal features. This work further introduces a rewiring phase to train the non-differentiable spike sequences without the use of gradients. During the rewiring, the network memorizes frequently occurring sequences and additionally discards those that do not contribute any discriminative information. The networks display competitive accuracies across various event-based time series datasets. We also propose an asynchronous digital hardware architecture using a time-wheel mechanism that builds on the event-driven design of DendroNNs, eliminating per-step global updates typical of delay- or recurrence-based models. By leveraging a DendroNN's dynamic and static sparsity along with intrinsic quantization, it achieves up to 4x higher efficiency than state-of-the-art neuromorphic hardware at comparable accuracy on the same audio classification task, demonstrating its suitability for spatiotemporal event-based computing. This work offers a novel approach to low-power spatiotemporal processing on event-driven hardware.
Comments:
Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Hardware Architecture (cs.AR); Emerging Technologies (cs.ET); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.09274 [cs.LG]
  (or arXiv:2603.09274v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.09274
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Jann Krausse [view email]
[v1] Tue, 10 Mar 2026 06:59:19 UTC (480 KB)
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