Based on research published by Mocanu et al., "Scalable Training of Artificial Neural Networks with Adaptive Sparse Connectivity inspired by Network Science"

This software is intended to be a starting point for developing more efficient implementations of SET networks. I am not a computer scientist; I have not gotten anywhere close to the potential computational efficiency of this training/inference procedure. Synapses uses a truly sparse weight matrix and transformations (not just a masked dense/fully-connected layer as used in the proof-of-concept work by the authors).

Synapses v0.0.1x offers the following:

• Sparse weight matrices & transformations
• An API for rapid implementation and experimentation with SET using PyTorch
  

My hope is that SET will gain popularity and this project will rapidly improve through community support.

Synapses is built entirely on PyTorch using pytorch v0.4.1; it probably works with other versions but has not been tested.

To use, install pytorch and install synapses with:

pip install synapses

for a usage demonstration, take a look at the MNIST example notebook.

Synapses recycles parameters after resetting connections; many optimizers (SGD with momentum, RMSprop, adaptive learning rate methods) use a buffer with memory about previous steps to compute weight updates. It's important to treat these buffers properly when re-initializing parameters. Synapses will take care of this, but to do so you must pass your optimizer object to your SETLayers after initializing the optimizer. Simply do (something like):

my_optimizer = torch.optim.SGD(params=model.parameters(), lr=1e-3, momentum=.9)
layer.optimizer = my_optimizer

With vanilla SGD (no momentum), this step is not necessary.

TODO:

• Fix bug with bias: currently SETLayer without bias is not working properly
• Build unit testing script that includes time benchmarking
• Improve computational efficiency