Assignment 3: Keras & CNNs

Deadline: November 1st, 9am

In this assignment, you will get to know Keras, the high-level neural network API in Tensorflow. You will also create a better model for the MNIST dataset using convolutional neural networks.

Keras

The low-level TF functions we used so far are nice to have full control over everything that is happening, but they are cumbersome to use when we just need “everyday” neural network functionality. For such cases, Tensorflow has integrated Keras to provide abstractions over many common workflows. Keras has tons of stuff in it; we will only look at some of it for this assignment and get to know more over the course of the semester. In particular:

• tf.keras.layers provides wrappers for many common layers such as dense (fully connected) or convolutional layers. This takes care of creating and storing weights, applying activation functions, regularizers etc.
• tf.keras.Model in turn wraps layers into a cohesive whole that allows us to handle whole networks at once.
• tf.optimizers make training procedures such as gradient descent simple.
• tf.losses and tf.metrics allow for easier tracking of model performance.

Unfortunately, none of the TF tutorials are quite what we would like here, so you’ll have to mix-and-match a little:

• This tutorial covers most of what we need, i.e. defining a model and using it in a custom training loop, along with optimizers, metrics etc. You can skip the part about GANs. Overall, the loop works much the same as before, except:
  • You now have all model weights conveniently in one place.
  • You can use the built-in loss functions, which are somewhat less verbose than tf.nn.sparse_softmax_cross_entropy_with_logits.
  • You can use Optimizer instances instead of manually subtracting gradients from variables.
  • You can use metrics to keep track of model performance.
• There are several ways to build Keras models, the simplest one being Sequential. For additional examples, you can look at the top of this tutorial, or this one, or maybe this one… In each, look for the part model = tf.keras.Sequential.... You just put in a list of layers that will be applied in sequence. Check the API to get an impression of what layers there are and which arguments they take.
• These latter three notebooks also show how to use Keras to train models in a single line (by compiling them and using fit) as well as evaluating trained models.

Another example notebook can be found on E-Learning.

CNN for MNIST

You should have seen that (with Keras) modifying layer sizes, changing activation functions etc. is simple: You can generally change parts of the model without affecting the rest of the program (training loop etc). In fact, you can change the full pipeline from input to model output without having to change anything else (restrictions apply).

Replace your MNIST MLP by a CNN. The tutorials linked above might give you some ideas for architectures. Generally:

• Your data needs to be in the format width x height x channels. So for MNIST, make sure your images have shape (28, 28, 1), not (784,)!
• Apply a bunch of Conv2D and possibly MaxPool2D layers.
• Flatten.
• Apply any number of Dense layers and the final classification (logits) layer.
• Use Keras!
• A reference CNN implementation without Keras (again to showcase the low-level operations) can be found on E-Learning!

Note: Depending on your machine, training a CNN may take much longer than the MLPs we’ve seen so far. Here, using Colab’s GPU support could be useful (Edit -> Notebook settings -> Hardware Accelerator). Also, processing the full test set in one go for evaluation might be too much for your RAM. In that case, you could break up the test set into smaller chunks and average the results (easy using keras metrics) – or just make the model smaller. Note that using a model’s evaluate function automatically works on minibatches.

You should consider using a better optimization algorithm than the basic SGD. One option is to use adaptive algorithms, the most popular of which is called Adam. Check out tf.optimizers.Adam. This will usually lead to much faster learning without manual tuning of the learning rate or other parameters. We will discuss advanced optimization strategies later in the class, but the basic idea behind Adam is that it automatically chooses/adapts a per-parameter learning rate as well as incorporating momentum. Using Adam, your CNN should beat your MLP after only a few hundred steps of training. The general consensus is that a well-tuned gradient descent with momentum and learning rate decay will outperform adaptive methods, but you will need to invest some time into finding a good parameter setting – we will look into these topics later.

If your CNN is set up well, you should reach extremely high accuracy results. This is arguably where MNIST stops being interesting. If you haven’t done so, consider working with Fashion-MNIST instead (see Assignment 1). This should present more of a challenge and make improvements due to hyperparameter tuning more obvious/meaningful. You could even try CIFAR10 or CIFAR100 as in one of the tutorials linked above. They have 32x32 3-channel color images with much more variation. These datasets are also available in tf.keras.datasets.
Note: For some reason, the CIFAR labels are organized somewhat differently – shaped (n, 1) instead of just (n,). You should do something like labels = labels.reshape((-1,)) or this might mess up the loss function.

What to Hand In

• A CNN (built with Keras) trained on MNIST (or not, see below). Also use Keras losses, optimizers and metrics. If you want, you can also make use of the convenient fit and evaluate functions.
• You are highly encouraged to move past MNIST at this point. E.g. switching to CIFAR takes minimal effort since it can also be downloaded through Keras. You can still use MNIST as a “sanity check” that your model is working, but you can skip it for the submission.
• Document any experiments you try. For example:
  • Really do play with the model parameters. As a silly example, you could try increasing your filter sizes up to the input image size – think about what kind of network you are ending up with if you do this! On the other extreme, what about 1x1 filters?
    • You can do the same thing for pooling. Or replace pooling with strided convolutions. Or…
  • If you’re bored, just try to achieve as high of a (test set) performance as you can on CIFAR. This dataset is still commonly used as a benchmark today. Can you get over 90% (on the test set)?
  • You could try to “look into” your trained models. E.g. the convolutional layers output “feature maps” that can also be interpreted as images (and thus plotted – one image per filter). You could use this to try to figure out what features/patterns the filters are recognizing by seeing for what inputs they are most active.

Some additional things to think about/look into:

• How does your CNN perform compared to an MLP of similar size?
• What about parameter counts – are CNNs more efficient?
  • In a CNN, where are most of the parameters actually located (e.g. early vs. late convolutional layers vss fully-connected layers)?