Contrastive-Signal-Dependent-Plasticity (CSDP)

This is the supporting code for the Science Advances paper: "Contrastive-Signal-Dependent-Plasticity: Self-Supervised Learning in Spiking Neural Circuits" the historical preprint of which can also be found here.
Note that this code was written on/run on an Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS and assumes that you have Python 3.10.6, jax/jaxlib 0.4.28 (for Cuda-12), and ngclearn 1.2.b3 (with ngcsimlib 0.3.b4) successfully installed on your system.

Installation

If you have Python 3.10.6 installed, you can automatically configure the needed dependencies via pip. It is recommended that you first create a separate Python virtual environment (VM) to act as a playground for this code (and protect your working environment) like so:

python3.10 -m venv env_csdp  ## create a playground VM
source env_csdp/bin/activate  ## activate/enter the playground VM

You can then install the required libraries/modules in your Python VM via the pip package installer like so:

pip install -r requirements.txt  ## install required libraries in your playground VM

Note: Running the above pip command will ensure that you have the GPU-enabled variants of JAX and NGC-Sim-Lib/NGC-Learn.

Running the Model Simulation

In order to run the simulation, make sure you unzip the mnist data prepared for you in the /data/ folder (unzip /data/mnist.zip and place it inside of /data/). To train a CSDP SNN model (with 3000 neuronal cells in the first layer and 600 cells in the second one), run the following prepared BASH script:

./sim_csdp.sh 0

This will train a CSDP SNN model on the MNIST database for you (on the GPU with identifier 0; if you want to run a different GPU, choose another appropriate integer identifier). Furthermore, the script will generate the model structure (in ngc-learn JSON format) as well as store NPZ files containing your best found parameters during training. All of this will be stored, if you run the script in its default mode (i.e., w/o modifying its arguments) to a folder exp_supervised_mnist/ which contains your saved ngc-learn CSDP SNN model.

Note: You can safely ignore the warnings collected in auto-generated logging/ directoy as these are simply where ngc-learn/sim-lib store library messages.

Running the Model Evaluation/Analysis

To evaluate your CSDP model after training it as above, run the following analysis BASH script:

./eval_csdp.sh 0

This script will run your CSDP SNN model (inference-only) on the test subset of the MNIST database. Inside your model directory, e.g., exp_supervised_mnist/, the analysis script above also creates a sub-directory called /tsne/. It is in here that you will find a t-SNE plot of your model's extracted latent codes (as well as a numpy array containing the tSNE embedding codes).

If you use this code or model mathematics in any form in your project(s), please cite its source article:

@article{
	doi:10.1126/sciadv.adn6076,
	author = {Alexander G. Ororbia },
	title = {Contrastive signal–dependent plasticity: Self-supervised learning in spiking neural circuits},
	journal = {Science Advances},
	volume = {10},
	number = {43},
	pages = {eadn6076},
	year = {2024},
	doi = {10.1126/sciadv.adn6076},
	URL = {https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/sciadv.adn6076}
}