Note from the future: We no longer use this specific code in our classes, but will keep it here for archiving purposes.

This tutorial is based on one that was previously found on the Tensorflow website. You can check that one for additional conceptual guidance, however the code snippets found there are intended for old Tensorflow versions (1.x). Since the official TF website is now lacking a comparable tutorial (the simple MNIST tutorials use Keras instead of low-level concepts), the following is supposed to offer an updated version working in Tensorflow 2.0. It is intended as a supplementary tutorial for Assignment 1 of our Deep Learning class and assumes that you already went through the other posts linked there.

Walkthrough

Preparation

Download this simple dataset class and put it in the same folder as your script/notebook. It’s just a wrapper for simple production of random minibatches of data.

Imports

import tensorflow as tf
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from datasets import MNISTDataset

Loading data and sanity checking

We make use of the “built-in” MNIST data in Tensorflow. We plot the first training image just so we know what we’re dealing with – it should be a 5. Feel free to plot more images (and print the corresponding labels) to get to know the data! Next, we create a dataset via our simple wrapper, using a batch size of 128. Be aware that the data is originally represented as uint8 in the range [0, 255] but MNISTDataset converts it to float32 in [0,1] by default. Also, labels are converted from uint8 to int32.

mnist = tf.keras.datasets.mnist
(train_images, train_labels), (test_images, test_labels) = mnist.load_data()

plt.imshow(train_images[0], cmap="Greys_r")

data = MNISTDataset(train_images.reshape([-1, 784]), train_labels, 
                    test_images.reshape([-1, 784]), test_labels,
                    batch_size=128)

Setting up for training

We decide on the number of training steps and the learning rate, and set up our weights to be trained with random initial values (and zero biases).

train_steps = 1000
learning_rate = 0.1

W = tf.Variable(np.zeros([784, 10]).astype(np.float32))
b = tf.Variable(np.zeros(10, dtype=np.float32))

Training

The main training loop, using cross-entropy as a loss function. We regularly print the current loss and accuracy to check progress.

Note that we compute the “logits”, which is the common name for pre-softmax values. They can be interpreted as log unnormalized probabilities and represent a “score” for each class.

In computing the accuracy, notice that we have to fiddle around with dtypes quite a bit – this is unfortunately common in Tensorflow.

for step in range(train_steps):
    image_batch, label_batch = data.next_batch()
    with tf.GradientTape() as tape:
        logits = tf.matmul(image_batch, W) + b
        loss = tf.reduce_mean(tf.nn.sparse_softmax_cross_entropy_with_logits(
            logits=logits, labels=label_batch))
        
    gradients = tape.gradient(loss, [W, b])
    W.assign_sub(learning_rate * gradients[0])
    b.assign_sub(learning_rate * gradients[1])
    
    if not step % 100:
        predictions = tf.argmax(logits, axis=1, output_type=tf.int32)
        acc = tf.reduce_mean(tf.cast(tf.equal(predictions, label_batch),
                             tf.float32))
        print("Loss: {} Accuracy: {}".format(loss, acc))

Predicting/testing

We can use the trained model to predict labels on the test set and check the model’s accuracy. You should get around 0.9 (90%) here.

test_predictions = tf.argmax(tf.matmul(data.test_data, W) + b, axis=1,
                       output_type=tf.int32)
accuracy = tf.reduce_mean(tf.cast(tf.equal(test_predictions, data.test_labels),
                             tf.float32))
print(accuracy)