VanillaCNN

What is this project?

This project implements a CNN that classifies handwritten digits from the MNIST dataset using only numpy.

Why?

Currently, while there are a lot of materials on Convoluational Neural Networks available online, to my knowledge, none of them concretely derives how CNNs work and then implements a CNN using their derivation. This project aims to concretely derives the math behind Convolutional Neural Networks and then implements an instance of CNN using this derivation.

Read the paper here! (Updated 12/12/2018)

How?

To run my implementation:

./vanilla_cnn

To run the Keras equivalence:

./keras_cnn

Look, the loss is actually decreasing!

After 3 days of training (I haven't done any performance optimization), it reached ~76.67% of accuracy, much higher than the 10% of accuracy of random guess.

It seems that the loss fluctuates a lot at the end of training. This suggests that I should dynamically adjust learning rate over time instead of keeping it constant.

To-dos

• Parallelize the computation of individual training data points, as they are completely independent of one another.

• Replace the sigmoid function in the Fully Connected Layer with the softmax function, which is often used for categorical predictions like with MNIST.

• Implement better variations of gradient descent (e.g. incorporating momentum, adjusting learning rate over time, etc.)

• Write unit tests to ensure each mathematical operation was implemented correctly.