Towards an Expressivity-Normalized Energy-Demand Comparison of ANNs and SNNs
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Computer Science > Machine Learning
arXiv:2608.29869 (cs)
[Submitted on 30 Aug 2026]
Title:Towards an Expressivity-Normalized Energy-Demand Comparison of ANNs and SNNs
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Abstract:Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are often regarded as energy-efficient alternatives to artificial neural networks (ANNs), yet their advantage depends critically on both network architecture and data properties. We develop an analytical framework to compare fully-connected ReLU ANNs and integrate-and-fire SNNs for time-series data with respect to their theoretical energy efficiency at matched expressive capacity. By relating an inference-energy model to theoretical bounds on representational expressivity, we derive an expressivity-normalized efficiency ratio and explicit thresholds in network width, spike sparsity, and ANN depth scaling. Our analysis characterizes the regimes in which event-driven computation offsets the temporal overhead of SNNs, providing capacity-aware principles for designing energy-efficient temporal networks. It shows that ANNs exceed SNNs in expressivity-normalized efficiency only in specific regimes.
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.29869 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2608.29869v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.29869
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Submission history
From: Miriam Kranzlmüller [view email][v1] Sun, 30 Aug 2026 15:56:17 UTC (100 KB)
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View a PDF of the paper titled Towards an Expressivity-Normalized Energy-Demand Comparison of ANNs and SNNs, by Miriam Kranzlm\"uller and 2 other authors
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