Book Image

Deep Learning with Theano

By : Christopher Bourez
Book Image

Deep Learning with Theano

By: Christopher Bourez

Overview of this book

This book offers a complete overview of Deep Learning with Theano, a Python-based library that makes optimizing numerical expressions and deep learning models easy on CPU or GPU. The book provides some practical code examples that help the beginner understand how easy it is to build complex neural networks, while more experimented data scientists will appreciate the reach of the book, addressing supervised and unsupervised learning, generative models, reinforcement learning in the fields of image recognition, natural language processing, or game strategy. The book also discusses image recognition tasks that range from simple digit recognition, image classification, object localization, image segmentation, to image captioning. Natural language processing examples include text generation, chatbots, machine translation, and question answering. The last example deals with generating random data that looks real and solving games such as in the Open-AI gym. At the end, this book sums up the best -performing nets for each task. While early research results were based on deep stacks of neural layers, in particular, convolutional layers, the book presents the principles that improved the efficiency of these architectures, in order to help the reader build new custom nets.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Deep Learning with Theano
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Dense connections


Stochastic depth skips some random layers by creating a direct connection. Going one step further, instead of removing some random layers, another way to do the same thing is to add an identity connection with previous layers:

A dense block (densely connected convolutional networks)

As for residual blocks, a densely connected convolutional network consists of repeating dense blocks to create a stack of layer blocks:

A network with dense blocks (densely connected convolutional networks)

Such an architecture choice follows the same principles as those seen in Chapter 10, Predicting Times Sequence with Advanced RNN, with highway networks: the identity connection helps the information to be correctly propagated and back-propagated through the network, reducing the effect of exploding/vanishing gradients when the number of layers is high.

In Python, we replace our residual block with a densely connected block:

def dense_block(network, transition=False, first=False, filters=16):
...