  Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are well suited for resource-constrained
applications as they do not need expensive multipliers. In a typical
rate-encoded SNN, a series of binary spikes within a globally fixed time window
is used to fire the neurons. The maximum number of spikes in this time window
is also the latency of the network in performing a single inference, as well as
determines the overall energy efficiency of the model. The aim of this paper is
to reduce this while maintaining accuracy when converting ANNs to their
equivalent SNNs. The state-of-the-art conversion schemes yield SNNs with
accuracies comparable with ANNs only for large window sizes. In this paper, we
start with understanding the information loss when converting from pre-existing
ANN models to standard rate-encoded SNN models. From these insights, we propose
a suite of novel techniques that together mitigate the information lost in the
conversion, and achieve state-of-art SNN accuracies along with very low
latency. Our method achieved a Top-1 SNN accuracy of 98.73% (1 time step) on
the MNIST dataset, 76.38% (8 time steps) on the CIFAR-100 dataset, and 93.71%
(8 time steps) on the CIFAR-10 dataset. On ImageNet, an SNN accuracy of
75.35%/79.16% was achieved with 100/200 time steps.
