Sparse Spike Encoding of Channel Responses for Energy Efficient Human Activity Recognition

ISAC enables pervasive monitoring, but modern sensing algorithms are often too complex for energy-constrained edge devices. This motivates the development of learning techniques that balance accuracy performance and energy efficiency. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are a promising alternative, processing information as sparse binary spike trains and potentially reducing energy consumption by orders of magnitude. In this work, we propose a spiking convolutional autoencoder (SCAE) that learns tailored spike-encoded representations of channel impulse responses (CIR), jointly trained with an SNN for human activity recognition (HAR), thereby eliminating the need for Doppler domain preprocessing. The results show that our SCAE-SNN achieves F1 scores comparable to a hybrid approach (almost 96%), while producing substantially sparser spike encoding (81.1% sparsity). We also show that encoding CIR data prior to classification improves both HAR accuracy and efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/ele-ciccia/SCAE-SNN-HAR.

Convolutional Spiking-based GRU Cell for Spatio-temporal Data

Spike-based temporal messaging enables SNNs to efficiently process both purely temporal and spatio-temporal time-series or event-driven data. Combining SNNs with Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs), a variant of recurrent neural networks, gives rise to a robust framework for sequential data processing; however, traditional RNNs often lose local details when handling long sequences. Previous approaches, such as SpikGRU, fail to capture fine-grained local dependencies in event-based spatio-temporal data. In this paper, we introduce the Convolutional Spiking GRU (CS-GRU) cell, which leverages convolutional operations to preserve local structure and dependencies while integrating the temporal precision of spiking neurons with the efficient gating mechanisms of GRUs. This versatile architecture excels on both temporal datasets (NTIDIGITS, SHD) and spatio-temporal benchmarks (MNIST, DVSGesture, CIFAR10DVS). Our experiments show that CS-GRU outperforms state-of-the-art GRU variants by an average of 4.35%, achieving over 90% accuracy on sequential tasks and up to 99.31% on MNIST. It is worth noting that our solution achieves 69% higher efficiency compared to SpikGRU. The code is available at: https://github.com/YesmineAbdennadher/CS-GRU.

Learned Spike Encoding of the Channel Response for Low-Power Environment Sensing

Radio Frequency (RF) sensing holds the potential for enabling pervasive monitoring applications. However, modern sensing algorithms imply complex operations, which clash with the energy-constrained nature of edge sensing devices. This calls for the development of new processing and learning techniques that can strike a suitable balance between performance and energy efficiency. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have recently emerged as an energy-efficient alternative to conventional neural networks for edge computing applications. They process information in the form of sparse binary spike trains, thus potentially reducing energy consumption by several orders of magnitude. Their fruitful use for RF signal processing critically depends on the representation of RF signals in the form of spike signals. We underline that existing spike encoding algorithms to do so generally produce inaccurate signal representations and dense (i.e., inefficient) spike trains. In this work, we propose a lightweight neural architecture that learns a tailored spike encoding representations of RF channel responses by jointly reconstructing the input and its spectral content. By leveraging a tunable regularization term, our approach enables fine-grained control over the performance-energy trade-off of the system. Our numerical results show that the proposed method outperforms existing encoding algorithms in terms of reconstruction error and sparsity of the obtained spike encodings.