REACT: A Fully Spiking State-Space Model for Real-Time Event-Driven Temporal Perception

Abstract

Robotic systems operating in dynamic environments require visual perception that evolves continuously with the incoming sensory stream. Event cameras provide microsecond temporal resolution and asynchronous sensing, but most learning-based methods accumulate events into frames or temporal bins, introducing an integration delay that can limit fast reaction. Here we propose REACT, a fully spiking state-space model for event-driven temporal perception that processes raw events one by one, without temporal accumulation. REACT uses a complex-valued spiking neuron, C-SiLIF, whose continuous-time dynamics are driven by the physical inter-event interval, allowing its internal state to evolve at the temporal resolution of individual events. We evaluate REACT on gesture recognition and time-to-collision (TTC) estimation from full-field event streams, without a target bounding box or localization input. On EvTTC, REACT achieves a 9.59% relative TTC error with 4.6 ms end-to-end inference latency, within 0.15 percentage points of the best learned method while requiring no target prior. At the dataset's mean approach speed, this latency corresponds to only 4 cm of vehicle motion, compared with 1 m for the fastest competing learned method. REACT further supports anytime TTC prediction, zero-shot transfer to a different driving sequence, and INT8 quantization, reducing the estimated energy consumption from 18.5 to 2.8 mJ per 32,768 events. These results show that event-driven spiking state-space dynamics can provide low-latency, continuously updated temporal perception for reactive robotic systems.