Sparsity netx pr

[Michaeljurado42]

Issue Number: #239

Objective of pull request: This code provides netX with the ability to interpret synapses as sparse types when converting SNNs from lava-dl to lava.

Pull request checklist

Your PR fulfills the following requirements:

• Issue created that explains the change and why it's needed
• Tests are part of the PR (for bug fixes / features)
• Docs reviewed and added / updated if needed (for bug fixes / features)
• PR conforms to Coding Conventions
• PR applys BSD 3-clause or LGPL2.1+ Licenses to all code files
• Lint (flakeheaven lint src/lava tests/) and (bandit -r src/lava/.) pass locally
• Build tests (pytest) passes locally

Pull request type

Please check your PR type:

• Bugfix
• Feature
• Code style update (formatting, renaming)
• Refactoring (no functional changes, no api changes)
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What is the current behavior?

What is the new behavior?

Does this introduce a breaking change?

• Yes
• No

Supplemental information

[bamsumit]

@Michaeljurado42 This looks good. Thanks for this one. Only one suggestion. Let's use sparse_fc_layer instead of sparsity_map

[Michaeljurado42]

Also, a final naming change which may be beneficial could be to rename the Dense proces defined in netx.blocks to FullyConnected or something. This would help us to not violate the naming convention in Lava which differentiates between dense and sparse layers. Similarly create_dense would become create_fully_connected. Your previous comment brought this to my attention.

Thank you for the feedback so far!

[bamsumit]

Also, a final naming change which may be beneficial could be to rename the Dense proces defined in netx.blocks to FullyConnected or something. This would help us to not violate the naming convention in Lava which differentiates between dense and sparse layers. Similarly create_dense would become create_fully_connected. Your previous comment brought this to my attention.

Thank you for the feedback so far!

On board with that. It would break a lot of things at this stage of this project though.

[bamsumit]

Thanks a lot @Michaeljurado42