Sensitivity Analysis for additive STDP rule

TL;DR

This paper investigates how small timing variations in spike events significantly affect synaptic weight evolution under the additive STDP rule, highlighting its sensitivity in biologically plausible conditions.

Contribution

It demonstrates the high sensitivity of additive STDP to spike timing variability, revealing potential limitations in its biological plausibility and robustness.

Findings

Small timing variations cause large differences in synaptic weight changes

Additive STDP is highly sensitive to spike timing in realistic conditions

Implications for the stability of synaptic learning rules

Abstract

Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) is a Hebbian like synaptic learning rule. The basis of STDP has strong experimental evidences and it depends on precise input and output spike timings. In this paper we show that under biologically plausible spiking regime, slight variability in the spike timing leads to drastically different evolution of synaptic weights when its dynamics are governed by the additive STDP rule.