SpikingBrain: Spiking Brain-inspired Large Models

TMLR Paper6607 Authors

Abstract: Mainstream Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) face significant efficiency bottlenecks: training computation scales quadratically with sequence length, and inference memory grows linearly. These constraints limit their ability to process long sequences effectively. In addition, building large models on non-NVIDIA computing platforms poses major challenges in achieving stable and efficient training and deployment. To address these issues, we introduce SpikingBrain, a new family of brain-inspired models designed for efficient long-context training and inference. SpikingBrain leverages the MetaX GPU cluster and focuses on three core aspects: (1) Model Architecture: linear and hybrid-linear attention architectures with adaptive spiking neurons; (2) Algorithmic Optimizations: an efficient, conversion-based training pipeline compatible with existing LLMs, along with a dedicated spike coding framework; (3) System Engineering: customized training frameworks, operator libraries, and parallelism strategies tailored to the MetaX hardware. Using these techniques, we develop two models: SpikingBrain-7B, a linear LLM, and SpikingBrain-76B, a hybrid-linear MoE LLM. These models demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale LLM development on non-NVIDIA platforms, and our training framework supports weeks of stable training on hundreds of MetaX GPUs with Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) at expected levels. SpikingBrain achieves performance comparable to open-source Transformer baselines while using exceptionally low data resources (continual pre-training of $\sim$150B tokens). Our models also significantly improve long-context efficiency and deliver inference with (partially) constant memory and event-driven spiking behavior. For example, SpikingBrain-7B achieves more than 100× speedup in Time to First Token (TTFT) for 4M-token sequences. Furthermore, the proposed spiking scheme achieves 69.15\% sparsity, enabling low-power operation. Overall, this work demonstrates the potential of brain-inspired mechanisms to drive the next generation of efficient and scalable large model design.

Submission Type: Long submission (more than 12 pages of main content)

Assigned Action Editor: ~Binhang_Yuan1

Submission Number: 6607