Bridging Spiking and Continuous Dynamics in Spiking Neural Networks: A Muscle-Inspired Model

Maryam Soltani, Philip N. Garner

Transforming the spike trains produced by spiking neural networks (SNNs) into continuous signals through biologically inspired mechanisms remains an open challenge in generative and regression tasks. In biological systems, a similar transformation occurs when muscles integrate neural spikes to produce smooth, coordinated movements. Inspired by this mechanism, we introduce a muscle-response model, a biologically motivated dynamical layer that converts spike trains into continuous representations. Our approach uses second-order dynamics to model the temporal integration of spiking activity. We investigate how the number of spiking neurons and temporal resolution affect the quality of the generated signals in a text-to-speech task, showing that increasing representational capacity has a greater impact than increasing temporal resolution under the evaluated configurations. Furthermore, an analysis of the learned dynamics reveals that, without explicit constraints on the response type, most neurons converge toward non-oscillatory behavior. These results demonstrate the potential of biologically inspired dynamical decoders for bridging spiking neural computation and continuous signal…