undergrad 🎓

A super small and cute neural net engine, using only numpy.

Inspired by micrograd and teenygrad, undergrad is a small and cute library to build neural nets. The library uses just numpy for better understanding what is happening behind the scenes, encouraging developers to learn machine learning theory from the source code.

This is the neural net engine I've built while I was doing the Machine Learning course in my Computer Engineering bachelor's, at UNICAMP. After the course, I've been improving to be a proper well-documented library.

The written documentation is done by docstrings throughout the source code. That way, you can learn how neural networks work from scratch by reading the code. The API is not pytorch-like, still, it's very intuitive for newcomers to machine learning.

• undergrad.model: model builder and layers (Dense only for now).
• undergrad.trainer: trainer module
• undergrad.ops: activation functions, loss functions and other machine learning operations.
• undergrad.optim: optimizers.
• undergrad.metrics: model evaluation functions.

FAQ

• You lied, I see you're using dependencies other then just numpy! 😡

  The undergrad engine uses only numpy, tqdm and torch.utils.data, because it uses PyTorch's Dataloader to do load data when iterating over the data to train and evaluate. The examples/ folder uses other dependencies for loading and transforming the datasets before feeding them to models, but these are not part of the undergrad library. However, the neural net engine and operations use only numpy as external dependency (I encourage you to check in the source code, my friend).

• How do I use it?

  Check the examples/ folder and read the source code, I've trained to explain everything thru the docstrings 😉

• This is better than tinygrad?

  No, it is not, not even close. But I think it's way simpler to understand simply because undergrad uses numpy instead of building a complex Tensor module. Also, the gradients equations are declared for each machine learning operation as a function, so it's easier to understand what's happening without something like autograd.

Benchmarks

• MNIST:

  ➜ paulopacitti undergrad git:(main) ✗ python examples/mnist.py
    [training]:
    100%|███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 20/20 [01:17<00:00,  3.89s/it]
    [balanced_accuracy_score]: 0.9484
    [accuracy_for_class]:
        class: 0    accuracy: 0.9730
        class: 1    accuracy: 0.9771
        class: 2    accuracy: 0.9727
        class: 3    accuracy: 0.9055
        class: 4    accuracy: 0.9169
        class: 5    accuracy: 0.9431
        class: 6    accuracy: 0.9664
        class: 7    accuracy: 0.9595
        class: 8    accuracy: 0.9129
        class: 9    accuracy: 0.9571

Contributing

Feel free to take part on this project to help building undergrad, a library that teaches beginners how neural nets work.

Roadmap

• Write framework;
• MNIST demo;
• Add typing hint to undergrad modules;
• Add documentation as comments throughout the source code;
• Improve MNIST demo with a better MLP network with better accuracy;
• Add convolutional layer construct to undegrad.ops;
• Add CIFAR10 demo;