Spiking Neural Networks for Continuous Control via End-to-End Model-Based Learning

Abstract

Despite recent progress in training spiking neural networks (SNNs) for classification, their application to continuous motor control remains limited. Here, we demonstrate that fully spiking architectures can be trained end-to-end to control robotic arms with multiple degrees of freedom in continuous environments. Our predictive-control framework combines Leaky Integrate-and-Fire dynamics with surrogate gradients, jointly optimizing a forward model for dynamics prediction and a policy network for goal-directed action. We evaluate this approach on both a planar 2D reaching task and a simulated 6-DOF Franka Emika Panda robot with torque control. In direct comparison to non-spiking recurrent baselines trained under the same predictive-control pipeline, the proposed SNN achieves comparable task performance while using substantially fewer parameters. An extensive ablation study highlights the role of initialization, learnable time constants, adaptive thresholds, and latent-space compression as key contributors to stable training and effective control. Together, these findings establish spiking neural networks as a viable and scalable substrate for high-dimensional continuous control, while emphasizing the importance of principled architectural and training design.