README.md

CS561-MNIST Project

This is the project repo for USC CS561 HW3 MNIST project. Implement a pure numpy neural network for hand written digit recognition task.

Training and testing shared a limit on total running time within 30 minutes, GPU acceleration and multiprocessing not allowed.

Dataset

10000 train and 10000 test images selected from MNIST dataset. Extract by running mnist_csv3.py.

Preprocessing

1. Normalize

2. Split training and validation sets on a ratio of 9:1

3. Augment training data by scale, rotation and translation

4. Shuffle and create batch

Network Specs and Hyperparams

• Structure: 4-layer MLP
• Activation: Tanh
• Loss func: Cross entropy loss
• Optimizer: Adam

Hyperparams

• lr: 1e-4
• batch size: 128
• epoch: 20 (with early termination)
• beta1, beta2: 0.9, 0.999
• weight decay: None
• cross validation: None

Result

Accuracy scoring on hidden train & test set on Vocareum: 0.9723