In this document, we will describe alternative versions of SAILnet \cite{Zylberberg_2011} which address the convergence issues present in the original. The first section \ref{descend} will briefly sketch the sparse approximation equations obtained when the membrane potentials in SAILnet are interpreted as continuous coefficients in our sparse coding model. In section \ref{spike}, we will show that a spiking version of our Rate-based Sparse and Independent Local network is guaranteed to descend the objective function \cite{Shapero_13}.