Spiking World Model with Multi-Compartment Neurons for Model-based Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Brain-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs) have garnered significant research attention in algorithm design and perception applications. However, their potential in the decision-making domain, particularly in model-based reinforcement learning, remains underexplored. The difficulty lies in the need for spiking neurons with long-term temporal memory capabilities, as well as network optimization that can integrate and learn information for accurate predictions. The dynamic dendritic information integration mechanism of biological neurons brings us valuable insights for addressing these challenges. In this study, we propose a multi-compartment neuron model capable of nonlinearly integrating information from multiple dendritic sources to dynamically process long sequential inputs. Based on this model, we construct a Spiking World Model (Spiking-WM), to enable model-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with SNNs. We evaluated our model using the DeepMind Control Suite, demonstrating that Spiking-WM outperforms existing SNN-based models and achieves performance comparable to artificial neural network (ANN)-based world models employing Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs). Furthermore, we assess the long-term memory capabilities of the proposed model in speech datasets, including SHD, TIMIT, and LibriSpeech 100h, showing that our multi-compartment neuron model surpasses other SNN-based architectures in processing long sequences. Our findings underscore the critical role of dendritic information integration in shaping neuronal function, emphasizing the importance of cooperative dendritic processing in enhancing neural computation.