README.md

CUDA Neural Network Implementation

It is a simple artificial neural network implementation using CUDA technology. This repository was created for the blog post available at luniak.io/cuda-neural-network-implementation-part-1 where much more information on this implementation can be found. It is just an educational implementation that has many performance issues and a lot can be improved.

Requirements and Technical Info

This repository contains Eclipse Nsight project.

To run this project CUDA Toolkit is required.

During compilation C++11 support has to be enabled.

Creating a Network

In order to create new neural network you need to create a NeuralNetwork object and add some layers to it. Available layers are:

• LinearLayer
• ReLUActivation
• SigmoidActivation

Layers set can be easily expanded by creating new layers classes derived from NNLayer and implementing forward() and backward() methods. Additionally there is a BCECost class that implements binary cross-entropy cost function. Below is an example of a simple network with two linear layers, one of them activated with ReLU function and the last one with sigmoid function.

NeuralNetwork nn;
nn.addLayer(new LinearLayer("linear_1", Shape(2, 30)));
nn.addLayer(new ReLUActivation("relu_1"));
nn.addLayer(new LinearLayer("linear_2", Shape(30, 1)));
nn.addLayer(new SigmoidActivation("sigmoid_output"));

Forward and Backward Pass

NeuralNetwork class implements forward() and backprop() methods. In order to make a prediction with created neural network you should call forward() function with input data as an argument (as Matrix object). If you want to perform backpropagation and update network weights you should call backprop() function with two vectors (Matrix objects), one with predicted values and second one with target values. Below is an example of a network training.

Matrix Y;
for (int epoch = 0; epoch < 1001; epoch++) {
  float cost = 0.0;

  for (int batch = 0; batch < dataset.getNumOfBatches() - 1; batch++) {
    Y = nn.forward(dataset.getBatches().at(batch));
    nn.backprop(Y, dataset.getTargets().at(batch));
    cost += bce_cost.cost(Y, dataset.getTargets().at(batch));
  }

  if (epoch % 100 == 0) {
    std::cout << "Epoch: " << epoch
              << ", Cost: " << cost / dataset.getNumOfBatches()
              << std::endl;
  }
}

Coordinates Dataset

CoordinatesDataset class generates random points in 2D space and assign a class for each of them. Points that lies within 1st or 3rd quadrant have class 1 other points have class 0. Points are stored in baches vector and class information in targets vector. During dataset creation one has to specify batch size and number of batches.

CoordinatesDataset dataset(100, 20);   // 20 batches, each containing 100 2D points
std::vector<Matrix> batches = dataset.getBatches();
std::vector<Matrix> targets = dataset.getTargets();