# 6.6. Convolutional Neural Networks (LeNet)¶

We are now ready to put all of the tools together to deploy your first fully-functional convolutional neural network. In our first encounter with image data we applied a multilayer perceptron (Section 4.2) to pictures of clothing in the Fashion-MNIST data set. Each image in Fashion-MNIST consisted of a two-dimensional $$28 \times 28$$ matrix. To make this data amenable to multilayer perceptrons which anticapte receiving inputs as one-dimensional fixed-length vectors, we first flattened each image, yielding vectors of length 784, before processing them with a series of fully-connected layers.

Now that we have introduced convolutional layers, we can keep the image in its original spatially-organized grid, processing it with a series of successive convolutional layers. Moreover, because we are using convolutional layers, we can enjoy a considerable savings in the number of parameters required.

In this section, we will introduce one of the first published convolutional neural networks whose benefit was first demonstrated by Yann Lecun, then a researcher at AT&T Bell Labs, for the purpose of recognizing handwritten digits in images—LeNet5. In the 90s, their experiments with LeNet gave the first compelling evidence that it was possible to train convolutional neural networks by backpropagation. Their model achieved outstanding results at the time (only matched by Support Vector Machines at the time) and was adopted to recognize digits for processing deposits in ATM machines. Some ATMs still runn the code that Yann and his colleague Leon Bottou wrote in the 1990s!

## 6.6.1. LeNet¶

In a rough sense, we can think LeNet as consisting of two parts: (i) a block of convolutional layers; and (ii) a block of fully-connected layers. Before getting into the weeds, let’s briefly review the model in Fig. 6.6.1.

The basic units in the convolutional block are a convolutional layer and a subsequent average pooling layer (note that max-pooling works better, but it had not been invented in the 90s yet). The convolutional layer is used to recognize the spatial patterns in the image, such as lines and the parts of objects, and the subsequent average pooling layer is used to reduce the dimensionality. The convolutional layer block is composed of repeated stacks of these two basic units. Each convolutional layer uses a $$5\times 5$$ kernel and processes each output with a sigmoid activation function (again, note that ReLUs are now known to work more reliably, but had not been invented yet). The first convolutional layer has 6 output channels, and second convolutional layer increases channel depth further to 16.

However, coinciding with this increase in the number of channels, the height and width are shrunk considerably. Therefore, increasing the number of output channels makes the parameter sizes of the two convolutional layers similar. The two average pooling layers are of size $$2\times 2$$ and take stride 2 (note that this means they are non-overlapping). In other words, the pooling layer downsamples the representation to be precisely one quarter the pre-pooling size.

The convolutional block emits an output with size given by (batch size, channel, height, width). Before we can pass the convolutional block’s output to the fully-connected block, we must flatten each example in the mini-batch. In other words, we take this 4D input and tansform it into the 2D input expected by fully-connected layers: as a reminder, the first dimension indexes the examples in the mini-batch and the second gives the flat vector representation of each example. LeNet’s fully-connected layer block has three fully-connected layers, with 120, 84, and 10 outputs, respectively. Because we are still performing classification, the 10 dimensional output layer corresponds to the number of possible output classes.

While getting to the point where you truly understand what’s going on inside LeNet may have taken a bit of work, you can see below that implementing it in a modern deep learning library is remarkably simple. Again, we’ll rely on the Sequential class.

import d2l
from mxnet import autograd, gluon, init, nd
from mxnet.gluon import nn

net = nn.Sequential()
nn.AvgPool2D(pool_size=2, strides=2),
nn.Conv2D(channels=16, kernel_size=5, activation='sigmoid'),
nn.AvgPool2D(pool_size=2, strides=2),
# Dense will transform the input of the shape (batch size, channel,
# height, width) into the input of the shape (batch size,
# channel * height * width) automatically by default
nn.Dense(120, activation='sigmoid'),
nn.Dense(84, activation='sigmoid'),
nn.Dense(10))


As compared to the original network, we took the liberty of replacing the Gaussian activation in the last layer by a regular dense layer, which tends to be significantly more convenient to train. Other than that, this network matches the historical definition of LeNet5. Next, we feed a single-channel example of size $$28 \times 28$$ into the network and perform a forward computation layer by layer printing the output shape at each layer to make sure we understand what’s happening here.

X = nd.random.uniform(shape=(1, 1, 28, 28))
net.initialize()
for layer in net:
X = layer(X)
print(layer.name, 'output shape:\t', X.shape)

conv0 output shape:  (1, 6, 28, 28)
pool0 output shape:  (1, 6, 14, 14)
conv1 output shape:  (1, 16, 10, 10)
pool1 output shape:  (1, 16, 5, 5)
dense0 output shape:         (1, 120)
dense1 output shape:         (1, 84)
dense2 output shape:         (1, 10)


Note that the height and width of the representation at each layer throughout the convolutional block is reduced (compared to the previous layer). The convolutional layer uses a kernel with a height and width of 5, which with only $$2$$ pixels of padding in the first convolutional layer and none in the second convolutional layer leads to reductions in both height and width by 2 and 4 pixels, respectively. Moreover each pooling layer halves the height and width. However, as we go up the stack of layers, the number of channels increases layer-over-layer from 1 in the input to 6 after the first convolutional layer and 16 after the second layer. Then, the fully-connected layer reduces dimensionality layer by layer, until emitting an output that matches the number of image classes.

## 6.6.2. Data Acquisition and Training¶

Now that we’ve implemented the model, we might as well run some experiments to see what we can accomplish with the LeNet model. While it might serve nostalgia to train LeNet on the original MNIST dataset, that dataset has become too easy, with MLPs getting over 98% accuracy, so it would be hard to see the benefits of convolutional networks. Thus we will stick with Fashion-MNIST as our dataset because while it has the same shape ($$28\times28$$ images), this dataset is notably more challenging.

batch_size = 256


While convolutional networks may have few parameters, they can still be significantly more expensive to compute than a similarly deep multilayer perceptron so if you have access to a GPU, this might be a good time to put it into action to speed up training.

For evaluation, we need to make a slight modification to the evaluate_accuracy function that we described in Section 3.6. Since the full dataset lives on the CPU, we need to copy it to the GPU before we can compute our models. This is accomplished via the as_in_context function described in Section 5.6.

# Save to the d2l package
def evaluate_accuracy_gpu(net, data_iter, ctx=None):
if not ctx:  # Query the first device the first parameter is on.
ctx = list(net.collect_params().values())[0].list_ctx()[0]
metric = d2l.Accumulator(2)  # num_corrected_examples, num_examples
for X, y in data_iter:
X, y = X.as_in_context(ctx), y.as_in_context(ctx)
return metric[0]/metric[1]


We also need to update our training function to deal with GPUs. Unlike the train_epoch_ch3 defined in Section 3.6, we now need to move each batch of data to our designated context (hopefully, the GPU) prior to making the forward and backward passes.

The training function train_ch5 is also very similar to train_ch3 defined in Section 3.6. Since we will deal with networks with tens of layers now, the function will only support Gluon models. We initialize the model parameters on the device indicated by ctx, this time using the Xavier initializer. The loss function and the training algorithm still use the cross-entropy loss function and mini-batch stochastic gradient descent. Since each epoch takes tens of second to run, we visualize the training loss in a finer granularity.

# Save to the d2l package.
def train_ch5(net, train_iter, test_iter, num_epochs, lr, ctx=d2l.try_gpu()):
net.initialize(force_reinit=True, ctx=ctx, init=init.Xavier())
loss = gluon.loss.SoftmaxCrossEntropyLoss()
trainer = gluon.Trainer(net.collect_params(),
'sgd', {'learning_rate': lr})
animator = d2l.Animator(xlabel='epoch', xlim=[0,num_epochs],
legend=['train loss','train acc','test acc'])
timer = d2l.Timer()
for epoch in range(num_epochs):
metric = d2l.Accumulator(3)  # train_loss, train_acc, num_examples
for i, (X, y) in enumerate(train_iter):
timer.start()
# Here is the only difference compared to train_epoch_ch3
X, y = X.as_in_context(ctx), y.as_in_context(ctx)
y_hat = net(X)
l = loss(y_hat, y)
l.backward()
trainer.step(X.shape[0])
timer.stop()
train_loss, train_acc = metric[0]/metric[2], metric[1]/metric[2]
if (i+1) % 50 == 0:
(train_loss, train_acc, None))
test_acc = evaluate_accuracy_gpu(net, test_iter)
print('loss %.3f, train acc %.3f, test acc %.3f' % (
train_loss, train_acc, test_acc))
print('%.1f exampes/sec on %s'%(metric[2]*num_epochs/timer.sum(), ctx))


Now let’s train the model.

lr, num_epochs = 0.9, 10
train_ch5(net, train_iter, test_iter, num_epochs, lr)

loss 0.478, train acc 0.820, test acc 0.829
63003.6 exampes/sec on gpu(0)


## 6.6.3. Summary¶

• A convolutional neural network (in short, ConvNet) is a network using convolutional layers.
• In a ConvNet we alternate between convolutions, nonlinearities and often also pooling operations.
• Ultimately the resolution is reduced prior to emitting an output via one (or more) dense layers.
• LeNet was the first successful deployment of such a network.

## 6.6.4. Exercises¶

1. Replace the average pooling with max pooling. What happens?
2. Try to construct a more complex network based on LeNet to improve its accuracy.
• Adjust the convolution window size.
• Adjust the number of output channels.
• Adjust the activation function (ReLU?).
• Adjust the number of convolution layers.
• Adjust the number of fully connected layers.
• Adjust the learning rates and other training details (initialization, epochs, etc.)
3. Try out the improved network on the original MNIST dataset.
4. Display the activations of the first and second layer of LeNet for different inputs (e.g. sweaters, coats).