I am currently following the course notes of CS231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition in Stanford University. There are programming exercises involved, and I wanted to share my solutions to some of the problems.

The Softmax classifier is one of the commonly-used classifiers and can be seen to be similar in form with the multiclass logistic regression. Like the linear SVM, Softmax still uses a similar mapping function $f(x_{i};W) = Wx_{i}$, but instead of using the hinge loss, we are using the cross-entropy loss with the form:

Here, $f_{j}$ is the j-th element of the vector of class scores $f$. In this implementation of the Sofmax classifier, we perform the following steps:

Now, I am excluding the “Data Loading and Preprocessing” section because they are similar with the SVM and kNN implementations. Moreover, the hyperparameter tuning and results can be seen in my IPython Notebook. This time, I will be keeping this post short, because I am so excited to do the neural networks assignment!!

## Naive Implementation

For the loss function, we can simply follow the equations in the course notes. Thus, we can also write the equation above as:

Now, in the case of the gradient, we can then have the following:

Where $p_{k}$ is equivalent to

And we simply run this through all examples in our training set:

num_train = X.shape[0]
num_classes = W.shape[1]
loss = 0.0
for i in range(num_train):

f_i = X[i].dot(W)
f_i -= np.max(f_i)

sum_j = np.sum(np.exp(f_i))
p = lambda k: np.exp(f_i[k]) / sum_j
loss += -np.log(p(y[i]))

for k in range(num_classes):
p_k = p(k)
dW[:, k] += (p_k - (k == y[i])) * X[i]


Notice that the form is similar to the SVM exercise that we had. Moreover, the $p_{k}$ equation above is expressed in code in terms of a lambda function. This makes everything much easier to do. Lastly, don’t forget to regularize and normalize our loss and dW before returning them.

# This is implemented outside our
# nested loops
loss /= num_train
loss += 0.5 * reg * np.sum(W * W)
dW /= num_train
dW += reg*W

return loss, dW


## Vectorized Implementation

I honestly found the vectorized implementation way easier than the naive one. It is because one has to simply follow the equations above. In this case, we have the following for the loss function:

num_train = X.shape[0]
f = X.dot(W)
f -= np.max(f, axis=1, keepdims=True)
sum_f = np.sum(np.exp(f), axis=1, keepdims=True)
p = np.exp(f)/sum_f

loss = np.sum(-np.log(p[np.arange(num_train), y]))


And we have the following for the gradient:

ind = np.zeros_like(p)
ind[np.arange(num_train), y] = 1
dW = X.T.dot(p - ind)


As usual, we should not forget to regularize and normalize our loss and gradient matrices.

I am currently keeping this post short because most of the questions and the exercises are in Softmax are quite similar to SVM. So I just focused on the more important parts such as the implementation of the loss and gradient. Furthermore, I’ve been itching to try out the neural networks assignment because it will be my first time to implement an ANN manually using Python!