
## ESL-SNNs: An Evolutionary Structure Learning Strategy for Spiking Neural Networks
Jiangrong Shen, Qi Xu, Jian K. Liu, Yueming Wang, Gang Pan, Huajin Tang
Keywords: CMS: Brain Modeling, CMS: Agent & Cognitive Architectures, CMS: Structural Learning and Knowledge Capture
AAAI/2023/Proceedings/25079 - ESL-SNNs: An Evolutionary Structure Learning Strategy for Spiking Neural Networks.pdf

### Implementation
_Given the documentation given by the authors on the method, how much time investment would it be to re-implement the method from scratch?_

[10]

The authors provide no implementation source. There is a process diagram available with some details, and pseudo code of the training process. No specific details are given regarding the implementation.

### Data
_Given the data description in the documentation, how much effort take to either: Find the same dataset the authors used, or similar datasets and defend the comparability, or acquire one from scratch?_

[4]

(3/3)

The authors use three public data sets but do not provide citations or metrics or descriptions on them. There are also no notes on possible processing / data loading steps which could provide difficulty for comparability.

### Configuration 
_Given the (hyper)parameters, including semantic parameters, of the method: How much effort would it take to acquire the algorithm configurations used for their results, and compare against their budgetary constraints?_

[4]

The authors note the width of the architecture and learning rate decay schedule. more details regarding training are given, but is its unclear if these are all the necessary hyperparameters. However, we do believe the most essential are presented here but the absence of the implementation makes this hard to verify. No details are given on how configurations were achieved.

### Experimental Procedure
_Given the experimental set-up of the work, how difficult is it to set up a new experiment, similar to those presented in the original work, with the same procedure?_

[2]

The authors provide single search results of their method. They use accuracy as metrics. 

### Expertise
_How much effort would it take to acquire the expertise required to reproduce the work independently relying on the available documentation?_

[4]

The method requires a good understanding of evolutionary algorithms and neural network pruning.
