  Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) provide an energy-efficient deep learning
option due to their unique spike-based event-driven (i.e., spike-driven)
paradigm. In this paper, we incorporate the spike-driven paradigm into
Transformer by the proposed Spike-driven Transformer with four unique
properties: 1) Event-driven, no calculation is triggered when the input of
Transformer is zero; 2) Binary spike communication, all matrix multiplications
associated with the spike matrix can be transformed into sparse additions; 3)
Self-attention with linear complexity at both token and channel dimensions; 4)
The operations between spike-form Query, Key, and Value are mask and addition.
Together, there are only sparse addition operations in the Spike-driven
Transformer. To this end, we design a novel Spike-Driven Self-Attention (SDSA),
which exploits only mask and addition operations without any multiplication,
and thus having up to $87.2\times$ lower computation energy than vanilla
self-attention. Especially in SDSA, the matrix multiplication between Query,
Key, and Value is designed as the mask operation. In addition, we rearrange all
residual connections in the vanilla Transformer before the activation functions
to ensure that all neurons transmit binary spike signals. It is shown that the
Spike-driven Transformer can achieve 77.1\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K,
which is the state-of-the-art result in the SNN field. The source code is
available at https://github.com/BICLab/Spike-Driven-Transformer.
