Personalized Spiking Neural Networks with Ferroelectric Synapses for EEG Signal Processing

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that ferroelectric memristive synapses enable adaptive, personalized spiking neural networks for EEG signal decoding, overcoming hardware constraints and improving subject-specific performance.

Contribution

It introduces a hardware-aware, mixed-precision learning strategy for ferroelectric SNNs and shows effective on-device adaptation for EEG classification.

Findings

Ferroelectric synapses enable comparable performance to software SNNs.

Mixed-precision, device-aware updates mitigate device variability and endurance issues.

Transfer learning with retrained final layers improves subject-specific accuracy.

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are strongly affected by non-stationary neural signals that vary across sessions and individuals, limiting the generalization of subject-agnostic models and motivating adaptive and personalized learning on resource-constrained platforms. Programmable memristive hardware offers a promising substrate for such post-deployment adaptation; however, practical realization is challenged by limited weight resolution, device variability, nonlinear programming dynamics, and finite device endurance. In this work, we show that spiking neural networks (SNNs) can be deployed on ferroelectric memristive synaptic devices for adaptive EEG-based motor imagery decoding under realistic device constraints, achieving classification performance comparable to software-based SNNs. We fabricate, characterize, and model the weight update in ferroelectric synapses. We then evaluate the deployment of convolutional-recurrent SNN architecture using two strategies. First, we adapt to SNNs a mixed precision strategy in which gradient-based updates are accumulated digitally and converted into discrete programming events only when a threshold is exceeded. Additionally, the weight update is device-aware and accounts for the nonlinear, state-dependent programming dynamics. During learning and adaptation, this scheme mitigates possible endurance and energy constraints. Second, we evaluate the transfer of software-trained weights followed by low-overhead on-device re-tuning. We show that, subject-specific transfer learning achieved by retraining only the final network layers improves classification accuracy. These results demonstrate that programmable ferroelectric hardware can support robust, low-overhead adaptation in spiking neural networks, opening a practical path toward personalized neuromorphic processing of neural signals.