Multiclass Support Vector Machine exercise

Complete and hand in this completed worksheet (including its outputs and any supporting code outside of the worksheet) with your assignment submission. For more details see the assignments page on the course website.

In this exercise you will:

  • implement a fully-vectorized loss function for the SVM
  • implement the fully-vectorized expression for its analytic gradient
  • check your implementation using numerical gradient
  • use a validation set to tune the learning rate and regularization strength
  • optimize the loss function with SGD
  • visualize the final learned weights

In [1]:
# Run some setup code for this notebook.

import random
import numpy as np
from cs231n.data_utils import load_CIFAR10
import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('nbagg')
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# This is a bit of magic to make matplotlib figures appear inline in the
# notebook rather than in a new window.
%matplotlib inline
plt.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (10.0, 8.0) # set default size of plots
plt.rcParams['image.interpolation'] = 'nearest'
plt.rcParams['image.cmap'] = 'gray'

# Some more magic so that the notebook will reload external python modules;
# see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1907993/autoreload-of-modules-in-ipython
%load_ext autoreload
%autoreload 2

CIFAR-10 Data Loading and Preprocessing


In [2]:
# Load the raw CIFAR-10 data.
cifar10_dir = 'cs231n/datasets/cifar-10-batches-py'
X_train, y_train, X_test, y_test = load_CIFAR10(cifar10_dir)

# As a sanity check, we print out the size of the training and test data.
print 'Training data shape: ', X_train.shape
print 'Training labels shape: ', y_train.shape
print 'Test data shape: ', X_test.shape
print 'Test labels shape: ', y_test.shape


Training data shape:  (50000L, 32L, 32L, 3L)
Training labels shape:  (50000L,)
Test data shape:  (10000L, 32L, 32L, 3L)
Test labels shape:  (10000L,)

In [3]:
# Visualize some examples from the dataset.
# We show a few examples of training images from each class.
classes = ['plane', 'car', 'bird', 'cat', 'deer', 'dog', 'frog', 'horse', 'ship', 'truck']
num_classes = len(classes)
samples_per_class = 7
for y, cls in enumerate(classes):
    idxs = np.flatnonzero(y_train == y)
    idxs = np.random.choice(idxs, samples_per_class, replace=False)
    for i, idx in enumerate(idxs):
        plt_idx = i * num_classes + y + 1
        plt.subplot(samples_per_class, num_classes, plt_idx)
        plt.imshow(X_train[idx].astype('uint8'))
        plt.axis('off')
        if i == 0:
            plt.title(cls)
plt.show()



In [4]:
# Split the data into train, val, and test sets. In addition we will
# create a small development set as a subset of the training data;
# we can use this for development so our code runs faster.
num_training = 49000
num_validation = 1000
num_test = 1000
num_dev = 500

# Our validation set will be num_validation points from the original
# training set.
mask = range(num_training, num_training + num_validation)
X_val = X_train[mask]
y_val = y_train[mask]

# Our training set will be the first num_train points from the original
# training set.
mask = range(num_training)
X_train = X_train[mask]
y_train = y_train[mask]

# We will also make a development set, which is a small subset of
# the training set.
mask = np.random.choice(num_training, num_dev, replace=False)
X_dev = X_train[mask]
y_dev = y_train[mask]

# We use the first num_test points of the original test set as our
# test set.
mask = range(num_test)
X_test = X_test[mask]
y_test = y_test[mask]

print 'Train data shape: ', X_train.shape
print 'Train labels shape: ', y_train.shape
print 'Validation data shape: ', X_val.shape
print 'Validation labels shape: ', y_val.shape
print 'Test data shape: ', X_test.shape
print 'Test labels shape: ', y_test.shape


Train data shape:  (49000L, 32L, 32L, 3L)
Train labels shape:  (49000L,)
Validation data shape:  (1000L, 32L, 32L, 3L)
Validation labels shape:  (1000L,)
Test data shape:  (1000L, 32L, 32L, 3L)
Test labels shape:  (1000L,)

In [5]:
# Preprocessing: reshape the image data into rows
X_train = np.reshape(X_train, (X_train.shape[0], -1))
X_val = np.reshape(X_val, (X_val.shape[0], -1))
X_test = np.reshape(X_test, (X_test.shape[0], -1))
X_dev = np.reshape(X_dev, (X_dev.shape[0], -1))

# As a sanity check, print out the shapes of the data
print 'Training data shape: ', X_train.shape
print 'Validation data shape: ', X_val.shape
print 'Test data shape: ', X_test.shape
print 'dev data shape: ', X_dev.shape


Training data shape:  (49000L, 3072L)
Validation data shape:  (1000L, 3072L)
Test data shape:  (1000L, 3072L)
dev data shape:  (500L, 3072L)

In [6]:
# Preprocessing: subtract the mean image
# first: compute the image mean based on the training data
mean_image = np.mean(X_train, axis=0)
print mean_image[:10] # print a few of the elements
plt.figure(figsize=(4,4))
plt.imshow(mean_image.reshape((32,32,3)).astype('uint8')) # visualize the mean image
plt.show()


[ 130.64189796  135.98173469  132.47391837  130.05569388  135.34804082
  131.75402041  130.96055102  136.14328571  132.47636735  131.48467347]

In [7]:
# second: subtract the mean image from train and test data
X_train -= mean_image
X_val -= mean_image
X_test -= mean_image
X_dev -= mean_image

In [8]:
# third: append the bias dimension of ones (i.e. bias trick) so that our SVM
# only has to worry about optimizing a single weight matrix W.
X_train = np.hstack([X_train, np.ones((X_train.shape[0], 1))])
X_val = np.hstack([X_val, np.ones((X_val.shape[0], 1))])
X_test = np.hstack([X_test, np.ones((X_test.shape[0], 1))])
X_dev = np.hstack([X_dev, np.ones((X_dev.shape[0], 1))])

print X_train.shape, X_val.shape, X_test.shape, X_dev.shape


(49000L, 3073L) (1000L, 3073L) (1000L, 3073L) (500L, 3073L)

SVM Classifier

Your code for this section will all be written inside cs231n/classifiers/linear_svm.py.

As you can see, we have prefilled the function compute_loss_naive which uses for loops to evaluate the multiclass SVM loss function.


In [9]:
# Evaluate the naive implementation of the loss we provided for you:
from cs231n.classifiers.linear_svm import svm_loss_naive
import time

# generate a random SVM weight matrix of small numbers
W = np.random.randn(3073, 10) * 0.0001 

loss, grad = svm_loss_naive(W, X_dev, y_dev, 0.00001)
print 'loss: %f' % (loss, )


loss: 9.007894

The grad returned from the function above is right now all zero. Derive and implement the gradient for the SVM cost function and implement it inline inside the function svm_loss_naive. You will find it helpful to interleave your new code inside the existing function.

To check that you have correctly implemented the gradient correctly, you can numerically estimate the gradient of the loss function and compare the numeric estimate to the gradient that you computed. We have provided code that does this for you:


In [10]:
# Once you've implemented the gradient, recompute it with the code below
# and gradient check it with the function we provided for you

# Compute the loss and its gradient at W.
loss, grad = svm_loss_naive(W, X_dev, y_dev, 0.0)

# Numerically compute the gradient along several randomly chosen dimensions, and
# compare them with your analytically computed gradient. The numbers should match
# almost exactly along all dimensions.
from cs231n.gradient_check import grad_check_sparse
f = lambda w: svm_loss_naive(w, X_dev, y_dev, 0.0)[0]
grad_numerical = grad_check_sparse(f, W, grad)

# do the gradient check once again with regularization turned on
# you didn't forget the regularization gradient did you?
loss, grad = svm_loss_naive(W, X_dev, y_dev, 1e2)
f = lambda w: svm_loss_naive(w, X_dev, y_dev, 1e2)[0]
grad_numerical = grad_check_sparse(f, W, grad)


numerical: 2.613228 analytic: 2.613228, relative error: 2.938559e-11
numerical: -25.727164 analytic: -25.727164, relative error: 1.268830e-11
numerical: -25.856213 analytic: -25.856213, relative error: 1.347577e-12
numerical: 3.471484 analytic: 3.471484, relative error: 4.431727e-11
numerical: -5.018402 analytic: -5.018402, relative error: 4.239040e-12
numerical: -4.099200 analytic: -4.099200, relative error: 1.227923e-10
numerical: -43.962607 analytic: -43.962607, relative error: 2.446993e-13
numerical: -13.936550 analytic: -13.936550, relative error: 9.454495e-12
numerical: -24.939617 analytic: -24.939617, relative error: 4.569595e-12
numerical: -38.864929 analytic: -38.864929, relative error: 5.455731e-12
numerical: -14.165202 analytic: -14.165580, relative error: 1.335624e-05
numerical: -6.737890 analytic: -6.737937, relative error: 3.477439e-06
numerical: 7.332930 analytic: 7.333077, relative error: 1.003608e-05
numerical: 26.350455 analytic: 26.350732, relative error: 5.270506e-06
numerical: -5.992370 analytic: -5.992602, relative error: 1.935476e-05
numerical: -7.655331 analytic: -7.655719, relative error: 2.534901e-05
numerical: 1.630900 analytic: 1.630394, relative error: 1.553640e-04
numerical: -0.260080 analytic: -0.259852, relative error: 4.389162e-04
numerical: 19.561272 analytic: 19.561526, relative error: 6.489233e-06
numerical: 15.905211 analytic: 15.905338, relative error: 3.991250e-06

Inline Question 1:

It is possible that once in a while a dimension in the gradcheck will not match exactly. What could such a discrepancy be caused by? Is it a reason for concern? What is a simple example in one dimension where a gradient check could fail? Hint: the SVM loss function is not strictly speaking differentiable

Your Answer: somtimes the function is not continuous (like hing loss), so f(x+h)-f(x) will be extreamly large (infint). That will cause gradient check to fail. example: f(x) = {x+1 if x>=0, x otherwise}. gradient = lim_h->0((f(0+h)-f(0))/h) = inf No reason for concern.


In [11]:
# Next implement the function svm_loss_vectorized; for now only compute the loss;
# we will implement the gradient in a moment.
tic = time.time()
loss_naive, grad_naive = svm_loss_naive(W, X_dev, y_dev, 0.00001)
toc = time.time()
print 'Naive loss: %e computed in %fs' % (loss_naive, toc - tic)

from cs231n.classifiers.linear_svm import svm_loss_vectorized
tic = time.time()
loss_vectorized, _ = svm_loss_vectorized(W, X_dev, y_dev, 0.00001)
toc = time.time()
print 'Vectorized loss: %e computed in %fs' % (loss_vectorized, toc - tic)

# The losses should match but your vectorized implementation should be much faster.
print 'difference: %f' % (loss_naive - loss_vectorized)


Naive loss: 9.007894e+00 computed in 0.124000s
Vectorized loss: 9.007894e+00 computed in 0.006000s
difference: 0.000000

In [12]:
# Complete the implementation of svm_loss_vectorized, and compute the gradient
# of the loss function in a vectorized way.

# The naive implementation and the vectorized implementation should match, but
# the vectorized version should still be much faster.
tic = time.time()
_, grad_naive = svm_loss_naive(W, X_dev, y_dev, 0.00001)
toc = time.time()
print 'Naive loss and gradient: computed in %fs' % (toc - tic)

tic = time.time()
_, grad_vectorized = svm_loss_vectorized(W, X_dev, y_dev, 0.00001)
toc = time.time()
print 'Vectorized loss and gradient: computed in %fs' % (toc - tic)

# The loss is a single number, so it is easy to compare the values computed
# by the two implementations. The gradient on the other hand is a matrix, so
# we use the Frobenius norm to compare them.
difference = np.linalg.norm(grad_naive - grad_vectorized, ord='fro')
print 'difference: %f' % difference


Naive loss and gradient: computed in 0.119000s
Vectorized loss and gradient: computed in 0.006000s
difference: 0.000000

In [13]:
#**Explanation on vectorized gradient and how to calculate dW:**
from IPython.display import Image
Image(filename='svm_vectorized_gradient_explanation.jpeg')


Out[13]:

Stochastic Gradient Descent

We now have vectorized and efficient expressions for the loss, the gradient and our gradient matches the numerical gradient. We are therefore ready to do SGD to minimize the loss.


In [14]:
# In the file linear_classifier.py, implement SGD in the function
# LinearClassifier.train() and then run it with the code below.
from cs231n.classifiers import LinearSVM
svm = LinearSVM()
tic = time.time()
loss_hist = svm.train(X_train, y_train, learning_rate=1e-7, reg=5e4,
                      num_iters=1500, verbose=True)
toc = time.time()
print 'That took %fs' % (toc - tic)


iteration 0 / 1500: loss 778.812292
iteration 100 / 1500: loss 283.942332
iteration 200 / 1500: loss 107.114874
iteration 300 / 1500: loss 42.152045
iteration 400 / 1500: loss 19.029414
iteration 500 / 1500: loss 10.279295
iteration 600 / 1500: loss 8.052362
iteration 700 / 1500: loss 5.792982
iteration 800 / 1500: loss 5.664888
iteration 900 / 1500: loss 4.976062
iteration 1000 / 1500: loss 5.192777
iteration 1100 / 1500: loss 5.375704
iteration 1200 / 1500: loss 5.752440
iteration 1300 / 1500: loss 5.241448
iteration 1400 / 1500: loss 5.300832
That took 9.100000s

In [15]:
# A useful debugging strategy is to plot the loss as a function of
# iteration number:
plt.plot(loss_hist)
plt.xlabel('Iteration number')
plt.ylabel('Loss value')
plt.show()



In [16]:
# Write the LinearSVM.predict function and evaluate the performance on both the
# training and validation set
y_train_pred = svm.predict(X_train)
print 'training accuracy: %f' % (np.mean(y_train == y_train_pred), )
y_val_pred = svm.predict(X_val)
print 'validation accuracy: %f' % (np.mean(y_val == y_val_pred), )


training accuracy: 0.367694
validation accuracy: 0.384000

In [19]:
# Use the validation set to tune hyperparameters (regularization strength and
# learning rate). You should experiment with different ranges for the learning
# rates and regularization strengths; if you are careful you should be able to
# get a classification accuracy of about 0.4 on the validation set.
learning_rates = [1e-7, 2e-7, 3e-7, 5e-5, 8e-7]
regularization_strengths = [1e4, 2e4, 3e4, 4e4, 5e4, 6e4, 7e4, 8e4, 1e5]

# results is dictionary mapping tuples of the form
# (learning_rate, regularization_strength) to tuples of the form
# (training_accuracy, validation_accuracy). The accuracy is simply the fraction
# of data points that are correctly classified.
results = {}
best_val = -1   # The highest validation accuracy that we have seen so far.
best_svm = None # The LinearSVM object that achieved the highest validation rate.

################################################################################
# TODO:                                                                        #
# Write code that chooses the best hyperparameters by tuning on the validation #
# set. For each combination of hyperparameters, train a linear SVM on the      #
# training set, compute its accuracy on the training and validation sets, and  #
# store these numbers in the results dictionary. In addition, store the best   #
# validation accuracy in best_val and the LinearSVM object that achieves this  #
# accuracy in best_svm.                                                        #
#                                                                              #
# Hint: You should use a small value for num_iters as you develop your         #
# validation code so that the SVMs don't take much time to train; once you are #
# confident that your validation code works, you should rerun the validation   #
# code with a larger value for num_iters.                                      #
################################################################################
for learning_rate in learning_rates:
    for regularization_strength in regularization_strengths:
        svm = LinearSVM()
        loss_hist = svm.train(X_train, y_train, learning_rate, regularization_strength,
                      num_iters=500, verbose=False)
        y_train_pred = svm.predict(X_train)
        y_val_pred = svm.predict(X_val)
        train_accuracy = np.mean(y_train == y_train_pred)
        val_accuracy = np.mean(y_val == y_val_pred)
        results[(learning_rate,regularization_strength)] = (train_accuracy, val_accuracy)
        if val_accuracy > best_val:
            best_val = val_accuracy
            best_svm = svm
################################################################################
#                              END OF YOUR CODE                                #
################################################################################
    
# Print out results.
for lr, reg in sorted(results):
    train_accuracy, val_accuracy = results[(lr, reg)]
    print 'lr %e reg %e train accuracy: %f val accuracy: %f' % (
                lr, reg, train_accuracy, val_accuracy)
    
print 'best validation accuracy achieved during cross-validation: %f' % best_val


lr 1.000000e-07 reg 1.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.294061 val accuracy: 0.309000
lr 1.000000e-07 reg 2.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.320429 val accuracy: 0.327000
lr 1.000000e-07 reg 3.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.339449 val accuracy: 0.348000
lr 1.000000e-07 reg 4.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.359796 val accuracy: 0.357000
lr 1.000000e-07 reg 5.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.362327 val accuracy: 0.367000
lr 1.000000e-07 reg 6.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.358633 val accuracy: 0.366000
lr 1.000000e-07 reg 7.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.369061 val accuracy: 0.379000
lr 1.000000e-07 reg 8.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.347816 val accuracy: 0.363000
lr 1.000000e-07 reg 1.000000e+05 train accuracy: 0.352388 val accuracy: 0.365000
lr 2.000000e-07 reg 1.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.336041 val accuracy: 0.352000
lr 2.000000e-07 reg 2.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.362122 val accuracy: 0.370000
lr 2.000000e-07 reg 3.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.365286 val accuracy: 0.359000
lr 2.000000e-07 reg 4.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.367184 val accuracy: 0.384000
lr 2.000000e-07 reg 5.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.361531 val accuracy: 0.363000
lr 2.000000e-07 reg 6.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.357531 val accuracy: 0.371000
lr 2.000000e-07 reg 7.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.361571 val accuracy: 0.387000
lr 2.000000e-07 reg 8.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.348082 val accuracy: 0.356000
lr 2.000000e-07 reg 1.000000e+05 train accuracy: 0.350327 val accuracy: 0.368000
lr 3.000000e-07 reg 1.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.356857 val accuracy: 0.350000
lr 3.000000e-07 reg 2.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.367041 val accuracy: 0.384000
lr 3.000000e-07 reg 3.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.364816 val accuracy: 0.371000
lr 3.000000e-07 reg 4.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.360898 val accuracy: 0.363000
lr 3.000000e-07 reg 5.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.355449 val accuracy: 0.373000
lr 3.000000e-07 reg 6.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.346531 val accuracy: 0.353000
lr 3.000000e-07 reg 7.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.344184 val accuracy: 0.363000
lr 3.000000e-07 reg 8.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.347776 val accuracy: 0.371000
lr 3.000000e-07 reg 1.000000e+05 train accuracy: 0.348184 val accuracy: 0.348000
lr 8.000000e-07 reg 1.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.346408 val accuracy: 0.363000
lr 8.000000e-07 reg 2.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.331041 val accuracy: 0.327000
lr 8.000000e-07 reg 3.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.305184 val accuracy: 0.325000
lr 8.000000e-07 reg 4.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.324776 val accuracy: 0.326000
lr 8.000000e-07 reg 5.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.319673 val accuracy: 0.329000
lr 8.000000e-07 reg 6.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.311816 val accuracy: 0.312000
lr 8.000000e-07 reg 7.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.290265 val accuracy: 0.283000
lr 8.000000e-07 reg 8.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.297694 val accuracy: 0.296000
lr 8.000000e-07 reg 1.000000e+05 train accuracy: 0.287204 val accuracy: 0.303000
lr 5.000000e-05 reg 1.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.180286 val accuracy: 0.180000
lr 5.000000e-05 reg 2.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.172469 val accuracy: 0.166000
lr 5.000000e-05 reg 3.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.150857 val accuracy: 0.159000
lr 5.000000e-05 reg 4.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.096041 val accuracy: 0.075000
lr 5.000000e-05 reg 5.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.055469 val accuracy: 0.068000
lr 5.000000e-05 reg 6.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.046327 val accuracy: 0.038000
lr 5.000000e-05 reg 7.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.052347 val accuracy: 0.048000
lr 5.000000e-05 reg 8.000000e+04 train accuracy: 0.042041 val accuracy: 0.034000
lr 5.000000e-05 reg 1.000000e+05 train accuracy: 0.047612 val accuracy: 0.047000
best validation accuracy achieved during cross-validation: 0.387000

In [20]:
# Visualize the cross-validation results
import math
x_scatter = [math.log10(x[0]) for x in results]
y_scatter = [math.log10(x[1]) for x in results]

# plot training accuracy
marker_size = 100
colors = [results[x][0] for x in results]
plt.subplot(2, 1, 1)
plt.scatter(x_scatter, y_scatter, marker_size, c=colors)
plt.colorbar()
plt.xlabel('log learning rate')
plt.ylabel('log regularization strength')
plt.title('CIFAR-10 training accuracy')

# plot validation accuracy
colors = [results[x][1] for x in results] # default size of markers is 20
plt.subplot(2, 1, 2)
plt.scatter(x_scatter, y_scatter, marker_size, c=colors)
plt.colorbar()
plt.xlabel('log learning rate')
plt.ylabel('log regularization strength')
plt.title('CIFAR-10 validation accuracy')
plt.show()



In [21]:
# Evaluate the best svm on test set
y_test_pred = best_svm.predict(X_test)
test_accuracy = np.mean(y_test == y_test_pred)
print 'linear SVM on raw pixels final test set accuracy: %f' % test_accuracy


linear SVM on raw pixels final test set accuracy: 0.366000

In [22]:
# Visualize the learned weights for each class.
# Depending on your choice of learning rate and regularization strength, these may
# or may not be nice to look at.
w = best_svm.W[:-1,:] # strip out the bias
w = w.reshape(32, 32, 3, 10)
w_min, w_max = np.min(w), np.max(w)
classes = ['plane', 'car', 'bird', 'cat', 'deer', 'dog', 'frog', 'horse', 'ship', 'truck']
for i in xrange(10):
  plt.subplot(2, 5, i + 1)
    
  # Rescale the weights to be between 0 and 255
  wimg = 255.0 * (w[:, :, :, i].squeeze() - w_min) / (w_max - w_min)
  plt.imshow(wimg.astype('uint8'))
  plt.axis('off')
  plt.title(classes[i])


Inline question 2:

Describe what your visualized SVM weights look like, and offer a brief explanation for why they look they way that they do.

Your answer: The weights look like some sort of combination between the training examples. For example the horse can be seen as headed horse becouse the horse in the training data sometimes turning left and somtimes turning right. So the combination between them is like the picture above.