Thomas Piacentini
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Python exercise

Train a tanh network on two spirals

Original text · English45 min

Two spirals that wind around each other are a hard test for a small classifier. No straight line and no simple curve splits them. In this task you train a network with two tanh hidden layers on mini-batches with Adam. The checks then measure it on new points that your code never sees.

Task

Write two functions.

  1. train(X, y, rng) trains a network and returns the trained model.
  2. predict(model, X) returns the label 0 or 1 for each row of X.

The data comes from make_spirals(n, rng) in support.py. Arm k \in \{0, 1\} is the curve r(t) = 3t / (4\pi) at the angle t + k\pi, for t from 0 to 4\pi, so each arm makes two turns. Each point has Gaussian noise with standard deviation 0.08. The first half of the rows has label 0 and the second half has label 1.

Use the layers of the lesson: Linear(2, 24), Tanh, Linear(24, 24), Tanh, Linear(24, 1) and a sigmoid output with the binary cross-entropy loss. Train with mini-batches and Adam. The rows of X are sorted by label, so take each mini-batch from a shuffled order of the rows. The label is 1 when the output probability is at least 0.5.

During training, call report(step, loss) from practice_check once for each update step. The first step is 0. The page draws these values as a live loss curve, and the checks count them.

Input and output

Name Type Shape Meaning
X float array (N, 2) the training points
y int array (N,) the label of each point, 0 or 1
rng np.random.Generator the only source of random numbers
model any the value that train returns
  • train returns the model. The model can be any Python value, for example a list of weight arrays.
  • predict returns an int array of shape (M,) for an input of shape (M, 2).

Constraints

  • Budget: at most 1500 update steps, so at most 1500 calls to report.
  • Target: accuracy of at least 0.95 on a held-out set of 2000 points made with a seed that this page does not give.
  • Take every random number from rng, also the shuffle order. The same seed must give the same model.
  • Do not change X or y.
  • predict must work for one point, shape (1, 2).
  • Use numpy only. One full submit has a limit of 25 seconds.

Examples

python
X, y = make_spirals(400, np.random.default_rng(0))
model = train(X, y, np.random.default_rng(1))
predict(model, np.array([[0.75, 0.0], [-0.75, 0.0]]))
text
[1 0]

At radius 0.75 the parameter is t = \pi. Arm 0 is at the angle \pi and arm 1 is at the angle 2\pi, so the point (0.75, 0) is on arm 1. The reference uses mini-batches of 64 and the Adam learning rate 0.01. It reaches a training accuracy of 1.0 on these 400 points. Its first reported loss is 0.7103 and its last is 0.0163, after 1500 steps.

Code and artifacts 15
What you take away

Saved in your notebook on this device.

Sources and limits

Reading checkpoints are self-reported. Test results are recorded separately and apply to the executed cases.

AI Engineering from Scratch · 3f9715c · MIT

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