Lava v0.5: Convolution, QUBO Solver, & New Tutorials

Created by Timothy Shea
Last updated: Sept 29, 2022
1 min read

Lava is getting a major update supporting several new Loihi hardware features and the first end-to-end application tutorials. Check out the release notes and clone the public repository to get started. Significant milestones include:

  • An initial version of the Lava Learning API for CPUs that allows users to evaluate learning rule implementations exactly as they run on Loihi 2, and a tutorial for 2-factor STDP.

  • An updated Lava Deep Learning (Lava-DL) application tutorial that makes full use of Loihi 2 features such as convolutional network compression and graded spikes.

  • The first version of a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) solver for optimization problems, and a tutorial on how to tune hyper-parameters to solve real-world problems.

This release period also included two new external Pull Requests from members of the community. Lava is available for free with permissive licensing – including commercial use – making it easy to contribute neuromorphic algorithms and applications that can be widely adopted by the community.

As with the previous release (see https://intel-ncl.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/INRC/blog/2022/07/14/1787756604), members of the INRC can setup the Lava extension for Loihi by following these instructions. If you’re not a member, take a look at https://intel-ncl.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/INRC/pages/1784807425 to get started.