In this assignment you will practice writing backpropagation code, and training Neural Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks. The goals of this assignment are as follows:

• understand Neural Networks and how they are arranged in layered architectures
• understand and be able to implement (vectorized) backpropagation
• implement various update rules used to optimize Neural Networks
• implement batch normalization for training deep networks
• implement dropout to regularize networks
• effectively cross-validate and find the best hyperparameters for Neural Network architecture
• understand the architecture of Convolutional Neural Networks
• gain an understanding of how a modern deep learning library (PyTorch) works and gain practical experience using it to train models.

Make sure your machine is set up with the assignment dependencies.

The preferred approach for installing all the assignment dependencies is to use Anaconda, which is a Python distribution that includes many of the most popular Python packages for science, math, engineering and data analysis. Once you install Anaconda you can run the following command inside the homework directory to install the required packages for this homework:

conda env create -f cs182_hw1.yaml

Once you have all the packages installed, run the following command every time to activate the environment when you work on the homework.

conda activate cs182_hw1

This assignment is provided pre-setup with a VirtualBox image. Installation Instructions:

1. Follow the instructions here to install VirtualBox if it is not already installed.
2. Download the VirtualBox image here
3. Load the VirtualBox image using the instructions here
4. Start the VM. The username and password are both cs182. Required packages are pre-installed and the cs182_hw1 environment activated by default.
5. Download the assignment code onto the VM yourself.

I get an error "AMD-V is disabled in the BIOS" or "Intel-VT is disabled in the BIOS" or similar

Solution: See this link

The virtual machine won't boot

Solutions:

• Try increasing the number of allocated CPUs: Under Settings→System→Processor
• Try increasing the amount of allocated memory:

Download data: Once you have the starter code, you will need to download the CIFAR-10 dataset. Run the following from the assignment1 directory:

cd deeplearning/datasets
./get_datasets.sh

Compile the Cython extension: Convolutional Neural Networks require a very efficient implementation. We have implemented of the functionality using Cython; you will need to compile the Cython extension before you can run the code. From the deeplearning directory, run the following command:

python setup.py build_ext --inplace

After you download data, you should start the IPython notebook server from the homework 1 directory with the following command:

jupyter notebook

This opens a brower tab for you to work.

If you are unfamiliar with IPython, you should read our IPython tutorial.

Once you are done working run the collect_submission.sh script; this will produce a file called assignment1.zip. Upload this file to Gradescope. The Gradescope will run an autograder on the files you submit. It is very unlikely but still possible that your implementation might fail to pass some test cases due to randomness. If you think your code is correct, you can simply rerun the autograder to check check whether it is really due to randomness.

The IPython notebook FullyConnectedNets.ipynb will introduce you to our modular layer design, and then use those layers to implement fully-connected networks of arbitrary depth. To optimize these models you will implement several popular update rules.

In the IPython notebook BatchNormalization.ipynb you will implement batch normalization, and use it to train deep fully-connected networks.

The IPython notebook Dropout.ipynb will help you implement Dropout and explore its effects on model generalization.

In the IPython Notebook ConvolutionalNetworks.ipynb you will implement several new layers that are commonly used in convolutional networks as well as implement a small convolutional network.

Now that you've implemented and gained an understanding for many key components of a basic deep learning library, it is time to move on to a modern deep learning library: Pytorch. Here, we will walk you through the key concepts of PyTorch, and you will use it to experiment and train a model on CIFAR10.

If you would like to access GPUs for faster training, we recommend you use Google Colab (https://colab.research.google.com/). If you use Colab for this notebook, make sure to manually download the completed notebook and place it in the assignment directory before submitting. Also remember to download required output file and place it into submission_logs/ directory.