The researchers proposed a reference-based strategy that uses Time-to-First Pulse (TTFS) encoding to transform the core components of large language models into sparse event-driven computations. The team constructed a full TTFS architecture with 1.5 billion parameters and conducted end-to-end training experiments on modern models such as BERT and GPT-2. The results showed that this method performed comparable to artificial neural networks in natural language understanding and common sense reasoning tasks, but there was a gap in language modeling complexity. This work was the first to expand pulse neural networks based on TTFS encoding to such a large scale, and reported pulse count estimates based on established cost models, rather than actual energy consumption measured with neural hardware.