Lesson 3 official topic

Part 1 2022
416

In the 4th chapter of the book, it is stated that there is no difference between models with two large layers versus models with multiple smaller layers, with the latter being easier to compute.

However, this reminded me of the multi-layered image classifier that Jeremy presented. It was demonstrated that the first layer identifies simple shapes, and the subsequent layers, building upon the previous ones, recognize increasingly complex features.

Doesn’t this contradict the thesis presented in the book? I mean, if there are only two large layers, there cannot be such a hierarchy of feature recognition, as nodes within the same layer are not connected to each other.

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417

While going through 04_mnist_basics notebook, I didn’t understand the reason behind using unsqueeze in

train_y = tensor([1]*len(threes) + [0]*len(sevens)).unsqueeze(1)
train_x.shape,train_y.shape

and

valid_x = torch.cat([valid_3_tens, valid_7_tens]).view(-1, 28*28)
valid_y = tensor([1]*len(valid_3_tens) + [0]*len(valid_7_tens)).unsqueeze(1)
valid_dset = list(zip(valid_x,valid_y))

I managed to replicate the training process from scratch on a new notebook without adding these extra dimensions and it seems unintuitive to me why it has been done so.

418

After going through 04_mnist_basics, I found these resources helpful in understanding tensors:

I also came across https://minitorch.github.io where you get to build your own mini PyTorch library from scratch. I’m looking forward to do it once I’m through with Part 1.

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419

I also came across https://minitorch.github.io 1 where you get to build your own mini PyTorch library from scratch. I’m looking forward to do it once I’m through with Part 1.

Part 2 of the fastai Course also involves you recreating many of PyTorch’s functions from scratch. :wink:

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Hi Folks,

I feel a little silly for asking, but what is the assignment for Lesson 3? I see some people discussing working with the MNIST dataset, but I can’t find any prompt or instructions to go off of.

Also, should we be sharing our work for each lesson here, or on the lesson thread, or maybe another place?

Thanks for your help!

Charles

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421

To answer your first question: there is a “Further Research” section after each chapter (see the chapter notebook) which has prompts for us students to explore.

For lesson 3/chapter 4, the prompts are:

  1. Create your own implementation of Learner from scratch, based on the training loop shown in this chapter.
  2. Complete all the steps in this chapter using the full MNIST datasets (that is, for all digits, not just 3s and 7s). This is a significant project and will take you quite a bit of time to complete! You’ll need to do some of your own research to figure out how to overcome some obstacles you’ll meet on the way.
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Thanks vbakshi.

I guess my confusion is that for Lesson 1 the video and notebook explicitly state the homework, which is different from the textbook. Then Lesson 2 is all about publishing a model, so the assignment (to create and publish a model) seems obvious, though I can’t find where it was explicitly stated. For comparison, the lesson 2 textbook assignment is to write a blog post (among other things).

After reviewing the Lesson 3 video it does appear to suggest homework. I believe it is referring to this kaggle notebook, but I don’t see a clear link there in the Lesson 3 resources. This again is different than the suggested homework from the textbook assignment, which you’ve kindly pointed me to.

So all that is to say, it is easy enough to follow the textbook. However the videos suggest that the material from the videos is different from the text and that one of the assignments for each video lesson is to read the corresponding chapter in the textbook. And given that the first 2 lessons appeared to assignments that were different from the textbook, it seems strange to pivot there for Lesson 3.

Maybe I am over thinking this ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I guess doing “all the things” will be best for learning.

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423

Ah I see. Yeah what I did in response to that segment of the video is run each cell in the “Getting started with NLP for absolute beginners” notebook before the Lesson 4 video. You are right that the material in the videos doesn’t always match the textbook, and I too took the “doing all the things” approach to cover it all.

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424

Hi all: I have a question regarding using spreadsheet to create a machine learning model. I don’t understand how creating the Ones column with the value of 1 can replace the value of b, the constant, in this forumua, mx + b. Can someone please explain it to me? thanks!