Building Supervision into Hebbian Plasticity through Spike Agreement

Abstract

Supervised learning in spiking neural networks (SNNs) typically requires either gradient-based backpropagation, which sacrifices the Hebbian, spike-driven character of biological plasticity, or reward-modulated Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity (STDP), in which class supervision enters only as a scalar gate on an otherwise class-agnostic correlation signal. We propose Supervised Spike Agreement-Dependent Plasticity (Supervised SADP), a gradient-free supervised Hebbian learning algorithm in which class information is embedded directly into the Hebbian plasticity computation rather than introduced through reward modulation. SADP trains the output layer via a supervised Hebbian rule that encodes class labels into output spike patterns, then trains the hidden layer by measuring each hidden neuron's chance-corrected temporal agreement, Cohen's kappa, with the correct-class output spike train produced by the forward pass without gradient computation or external reward. A K-shift extension aggregates agreement over temporal offsets, providing robustness to spike-timing jitter at linear computational cost. We evaluate Supervised SADP against reward-modulated STDP across six benchmark and medical imaging datasets, four input encoding strategies, K_shift in {5,25}, and three reward modes (none, binary, margin). Supervised SADP outperforms STDP in a significant majority of comparisons. Under Poisson encoding, SADP achieves 86.46% on MNIST and 76.62% on Fashion-MNIST, outperforming the best STDP configurations by 23.66 and 23.29 percentage points, respectively. Across the encodings tested, including CNN-extracted features, SADP outperforms STDP in the large majority of cells and trains 1.47x faster on average, with up to 2.86x speedup under Poisson inputs. These results position Supervised SADP as a stable, efficient, gradient-free alternative to reward-modulated STDP for supervised SNN learning.