spikeforge

A spiking-neural-network (SNN) toolkit built on snnTorch and PyTorch. Loads MNIST-style and neuromorphic event datasets, encodes them into rate, latency, delta, and random spikes, and trains, validates, exports, and deploys LIF networks — with a live browser dashboard served over WebSockets.

Pre-1.0. Before trusting any number this produces, read Implications and boundaries.

Quickstart

git clone https://github.com/capsize-games/spikeforge.git
cd spikeforge
docker compose up --build

Open http://localhost:8877 — the dashboard connects to the WebSocket on the same host and port. No separate backend or proxy to run.

Prefer a local install, a headless example, or the CLI tools instead? See Usage and Quickstart for every path (./install.sh, local dev with Vite, examples/, and the eight spikeforge-* console scripts).

Features

• Encoding — rate, latency, delta, and random spike coders.
• Training — fully-connected and convolutional LIF networks with surrogate-gradient cross-entropy, checkpointing, and opt-in AMP / gradient checkpointing / truncated BPTT / multi-GPU.
• Topologies — fc_legacy, fc_small, conv_net, recurrent_net, plus the sequence presets sequence_mlp and sequence_attn.
• Datasets — MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, KMNIST, QMNIST, USPS, EMNIST, CIFAR-10, and (via the events extra) N-MNIST, DVS128 Gesture, CIFAR10-DVS, and Spiking Speech Commands.
• Interpreter spine — NIR export, an independent NIR interpreter, and numerical drift validation.
• Introspection — educational-mode U[t]/I[t]/S[t] traces, trajectory metrics, and surrogate-derivative curves.
• Deployment — a capability matrix, weight quantization, energy accounting, and executable reference, norse, and lava_loihi2 backends.
• Model hub — a curated, offline-first catalog plus optional live Hugging Face search.
• Dashboard — a React + TypeScript UI with training, introspection, analysis, targets, energy, and hub panels, and seven guided walkthroughs.

Packages

This repository is a single workspace that publishes four distributions:

Distribution	Import root	Purpose
spikeforge	spikeforge	Core package: encoders, topologies, training, simulator, NIR bridge, tracking
spikeforge-targets	spikeforge_targets	Deployment targets, quantization, energy accounting, sparse event runtime
spikeforge-hub	spikeforge_hub	Curated model hub and optional Hugging Face access
spikeforge-server	server	FastAPI + WebSocket server and dashboard hosting

Documentation

This README stays short on purpose. documentation/ is the full reference — install paths, the CLI tools, architecture, module layout, and the dev workflow — written for contributors and coding agents alike. Also see COOKBOOK.md for copy-pasteable recipes, examples/ for runnable end-to-end scripts, and plans/ for design documents and the roadmap.

See CONTRIBUTING.md and rules.md before opening a pull request.

Citing

If spikeforge is useful in your research, please cite it — see CITATION.cff (GitHub renders a "Cite this repository" button from it automatically).

License

Released under the BSD 3-Clause License — see LICENSE and AUTHORS.