DragonXDev / pytorch-mnist-nn

A neural network designed to convert handwritten digits into their numerical value.

MNIST PyTorch Neural Network

A MNIST CNN developed to recognize handwritten digits; grayscale input channel of 1 accepted, 1x28x28 input.

Usage & Information

The CNN is trained in batches of 32 from the DB. Each of the 32 filters is a 2D 3x3 and extracted from the 1x28x28

A Visual of an MNIST CNN

To train the CNN,

poetry run python src/train_model.py

This will contact the MNIST DB & run 10 epochs to train the model. The appropriate state after the model is finished executing will be created as the digital_model.pt file.

Once completed, run the model with the binary generated using

poetry run python src/main.py

Optimizers

For the purpose of MNIST, the Adam optimizer with lr=1e-3 performs best

Adam

Starting with Stochastic Gradient Descent

$$g = \frac{1}{m} \nabla_{\theta}\sum_{i}L(f(x^{(i)};\theta),y^{(i)})$$

Where $\theta$ is the models' params, $g$ is the negative direction of the gradient, $m$ is the size of the mini-batches of data, $f(x^{(i)}; \theta)$ is the neural network, $x^{(i)}$ is the training data, $y^{(i)}$ are the training labels, and $L()$ is the loss function.

The Adam optimizer redefines SGD's params as such:

$$m = \beta_{1}m + (1-\beta_{1})g$$ $$s = \beta_{2}s + (1-\beta_{2})g^{T}g$$ $$\theta = \theta - \epsilon_{k}\cdot\frac{m}{\sqrt{s+eps}}$$

For this project, $\beta_{1} = 0.9$, $\beta_{2} = 0.999$, and $eps$ (learning rate) $=$ 1e-3.

Nesterov Momentum $\nabla$

Nesterov's Momentum Acceleration $\nabla$ (NAG) performs significantly worse than Adam.

$$\nu = \alpha\nu - \epsilon\nabla_{\theta}(\frac{1}{m}\sum_{i}L(f(x^{(i)};\theta+\alpha\cdot\nu),y^{(i)})$$ $$\theta = \theta + \nu$$

The loss / cost after Epoch 10 ended at ~ 0.01253 on average.

Contributors

I am the sole contributor of this project.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md