Compute-Optimal Scaling Laws for Spiking Language Models
Spiking neural networks target energy-efficient language modeling through sparse, binary activations, but the efficiency-accuracy tradeoff of spiking language models is uncharacterized at scale. We present the first Chinchilla-style IsoFLOP scaling study of a spiking language model, sweeping SpikeGPT-family models (RWKV backbone) from width 384 to 1536 across compute budgets from $3\times10^{17}$ to $10^{19}$ FLOPs on FineWeb-EDU. We report two findings. First, the compute-optimal frontier is $N_{opt} \propto C^{0.56}$, close to the 0.50 that Hoffmann et al. report for dense Transformers, so spiking does not change how parameters and data should be traded off under a compute budget. Secon...
| Authors | Dan Saunders, Benjamin Ren, Catherine He |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 10 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 October 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 14 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.