Contents

# Introduction

In this blog we shall see how to build a Feedforward Neural Network from scratch, we shall use this for performing MNIST digit classification. First, we shall bring out the mathematical framework of the feed-forward neural network. This network shall use sigmoid activation for the hidden layers and softmax for the last layer with multi-class cross entropy loss (see later sections for details). Before proceeding any further we shall now define a few notations and terminologies.

• $l$ indicates a layer in the network, here, $1 \leq l \leq N$ where $N$ represents the numbers of layers in the network (Note: as per the convention input layer is not counted when we say $N$-layer neural network. Furthermore, for the network shown in Fig.1 $N=2$).

• Subscripts $k,j,i,\dots$ usually denotes neuron indices in layers $l=N,N-1,N-2,\dots$

• $z_k^l$ represents the weighted sum of activations from the previous layer at layer $l$. That is,

$z_k^l=\sum_j w_{kj}a_j^{l-1}+b_k$
• $a^l_k$ represents the neuron activations at layer $l$, $a^l_k=f(s^l_k)$, where $f(.)$ is the activation function. We shall be using softmax activation for the last layer $(l=N)$

$a^N_k = \frac{e^{z_k^N}}{\sum_c e^{z_c^N}}$

Here, $c$ is the number of classes. For all other layers $(l\neq N)$ we shall use the sigmoid activation function.

$a^l_k = \frac{1}{1+e^{-z_k^l}}$
• $y_k$ is the ground truth (one-hot encoded) vector for the $k^{th}$ sample.

• $\hat{y}_k$ is the predicted vector for the $k^{th}$ sample.

Fig.1: A schematic of two layered neural network

# Forward pass

Now let us consider a Neural Network having two layers $(N=2)$ as shown in Fig. [[fig:nn_vis]]. Here, we have $n$ neurons in the input layer (features), $nh$ neurons in the hidden layer and $no$ neurons in the output layer. As an aside, $1\leq i \leq n$, $1\leq j \leq nh$, and $1\leq k \leq no$. We shall now layout the equations for the forward pass through the network. For layer $l=N-1=1$

$z_j^l=\sum_i^n w_{ji}a_i^{l-1}+b_j$

where, $a_i^{l-1}=a_i^0 = x_i^0$. Now we shall pass this weighted sum $s_j^l$ through the activation function $f_1()$ i.e. sigmoid activation.

$a_j^l=f_1(z_j^l)$

This output of layer $l=1$ is now fed to layer $l=2$ i.e. the output layer. For layer $l=N=2$

$z_k^l=\sum_j^{nh} w_{kj}a_j^{l-1}+b_k$

Similarly, we shall fed this weighted sum to another activation function $f_2()$ i.e. softmax activation.

$a_k^l=f_2(z_k^l)$

The final output vector $a_k^l$ contains the probability for the $k^{th}$ class. This class prediction might not make much sense as they take in weights and biases which are randomly initialized. Our prime goal here is to find the weights such that the predicted class probabilities are consistent with the ground truth labels in the training data. In order to achieve this, we need to come up with a metric to measure the goodness (or badness) of the network, this can be done by constructing a loss function. The loss function can then be used to perform optimization by updating weights. We shall be using the multi-class cross-entropy loss in our approach. The loss for a given sample can be calculated using it’s one hot encoded vector $(y)$ and the prediction $\hat{y}$ (which is essentially $a_k^l$ or $a_k^2$ for $l=2$).

$L(\hat{a},a) = -\sum^c_{k=1} y_k \log \hat{y_k}$

This can then be used to calculate loss across all samples (total number of samples: $m$) as

$J(w^1,b^1,\dots) = \frac{1}{m} \sum_{i=1}^mL(\hat{y}^i,y^i)$

One important result that we take directly without any derivation is the gradient of $J$ with respect to $z_k^{l=2}$ (simplified as $z^2$).

$\frac{\partial J}{\partial z^{2}} = \hat{y} - y$

# Backward pass

In this subsection, we shall bring out the mechanism to update the weights and biases by backpropagating the loss into the network. We shall update the weights using an iterative approach, more precisely using the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The weights can be updated using

$w_{kj}(t+1) = w_{kj}(t) - \eta \frac{\partial J}{\partial w_{kj}}$ $w_{ji}(t+1) = w_{ji}(t) - \eta \frac{\partial J}{\partial w_{ji}}$

Here, $\eta$ is a hyperparameter called learning rate. Similarly, the biases can also be updated.

$b_{k}(t+1) = b_{k}(t) - \eta \frac{\partial J}{\partial b_{k}}$ $b_{j}(t+1) = b_{j}(t) - \eta \frac{\partial J}{\partial b_{j}}$

Now, our goal is to find the gradients. This gradients can be obtained by backpropagating via the network usinf the chain-rule.

$\frac{\partial J}{\partial w_{kj}} = \frac{\partial J}{\partial z^{2}} \frac{\partial z^{2}}{\partial w_{kj}} = (\hat{y} - y) z_k$ $\frac{\partial J}{\partial b_{k}} = \frac{\partial J}{\partial b_{k}} \frac{\partial z^{2}}{\partial b_{k}} = (\hat{y} - y)$ $\frac{\partial J}{\partial w_{ji}} = \frac{\partial J}{\partial z^{2}} \frac{\partial z^{2}}{\partial a_{j}} \frac{\partial a_{j}}{\partial z^{1}} \frac{\partial z^{1}}{\partial w_{ji}}= (\hat{y} - y) w_{kj} f_1(z^1)(1-f_1(z^1)) a_i$ $\frac{\partial J}{\partial b_{j}} = \frac{\partial J}{\partial z^{2}} \frac{\partial z^{2}}{\partial a_{j}} \frac{\partial a_{j}}{\partial z^{1}} \frac{\partial z^{1}}{\partial b_{j}}= (\hat{y} - y) w_{kj} f_1(z^1)(1-f_1(z^1))$

Hence, by using the above set of equations we can run SGD and update the trainable parameters for this two layered network. The same idea can be extended to build multilayered networks.

# Python implementation

The full Python3 impmentation with explaination can be found in this Jupyter notebook. The model was trained using different combinations of activation functions and # of neurons (all models have same learning rate of $0.1$). The test accuracy has been shown in Table 1. The accuracy is highest for the sigmoid activation using $265$ neurons. For the sigmoid activation the accuracy increases with increase in # neurons, while for the ReLU and tanh activation it first increases and then goes stagnant. This can be attributed to the fact that we haven’t applied early stopping in our training process as it is a well known fact that Early stopping is some form of L2 Regularization. We wanted to perform our analysis on same set of parameters. In practice, it is a good idea to use early stopping by choosing some threshold where the validation loss starts increasing by that threshold than the previous validation loss. One important observation here is that performance of ReLU is not as expected. This is attributed to the fact that we required a higher learning rate of 0.1 in SGD for Sigmoid activation function to converge. For lower learning rates the SGD wasn’t converging whereas performance of ReLU was improving significantly improved as expected. Therefore, to test over same parameters we finally chose learning rate to be 0.1.

Activation

# Neurons

Sigmoid ReLU Tanh
32 89.44 39.12 71.06
64 89.98 64.16 74.40
128 90.32 61.82 69.78
256 91.62 31.68 55.06

Table 1: Test accuracy using different number of hidden neurons and activations

Training time for same set of parameters is shown in Table 3. It can be observed that tanh takes the largest training time whereas ReLU is the fastest. Also training time is increasing with # of neurons as expected.

Activation

# Neurons

Sigmoid ReLU Tanh
32 133.137 116.511 145.912
64 170.921 152.531 205.702
128 255.141 207.650 298.367
256 371.729 288.749 448.806

Table 2: Training time $(s)$ for different number of hidden neurons and activations