SymbolicLight V1

SymbolicLight V1: Spike-Gated Dual-Path Language Model with High Activation Sparsity

SymbolicLight V1 is a 194M-parameter spiking language model that combines binary Leaky Integrate-and-Fire spike dynamics with a continuous residual stream, replacing dense self-attention with a dual-path module using exponential-decay aggregation and spike-gated local attention. Trained from scratch on a 3B-token Chinese-English corpus, it achieves validation perplexity of 8.88–8.93 at over 89% per-element activation sparsity, trailing GPT-2 201M by 7.7% in PPL. Ablations indicate that temporal integration via LIF dynamics contributes more to performance than sparsity alone, and a 0.8B-parameter scale-up on 48.8B tokens demonstrates optimization stability. Current dense-hardware inference is slower than GPT-2; neuromorphic deployment is framed as a future opportunity.