This assignment is due on Friday, April 16 2021 at 11:59pm PST.

Starter code containing Colab notebooks can be downloaded here.

Setup

Please familiarize yourself with the recommended workflow before starting the assignment. You should also watch the Colab walkthrough tutorial below.

Note. Ensure you are periodically saving your notebook (File -> Save) so that you don’t lose your progress if you step away from the assignment and the Colab VM disconnects.

Once you have completed all Colab notebooks except collect_submission.ipynb, proceed to the submission instructions.

Goals

In this assignment you will practice putting together a simple image classification pipeline based on the k-Nearest Neighbor or the SVM/Softmax classifier. The goals of this assignment are as follows:

  • Understand the basic Image Classification pipeline and the data-driven approach (train/predict stages).
  • Understand the train/val/test splits and the use of validation data for hyperparameter tuning.
  • Develop proficiency in writing efficient vectorized code with numpy.
  • Implement and apply a k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) classifier.
  • Implement and apply a Multiclass Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier.
  • Implement and apply a Softmax classifier.
  • Implement and apply a Two layer neural network classifier.
  • Understand the differences and tradeoffs between these classifiers.
  • Get a basic understanding of performance improvements from using higher-level representations as opposed to raw pixels, e.g. color histograms, Histogram of Gradient (HOG) features, etc.

Q1: k-Nearest Neighbor classifier

The notebook knn.ipynb will walk you through implementing the kNN classifier.

Q2: Training a Support Vector Machine

The notebook svm.ipynb will walk you through implementing the SVM classifier.

Q3: Implement a Softmax classifier

The notebook softmax.ipynb will walk you through implementing the Softmax classifier.

Q4: Two-Layer Neural Network

The notebook two_layer_net.ipynb will walk you through the implementation of a two-layer neural network classifier.

Q5: Higher Level Representations: Image Features

The notebook features.ipynb will examine the improvements gained by using higher-level representations as opposed to using raw pixel values.

Submitting your work

Important. Please make sure that the submitted notebooks have been run and the cell outputs are visible.

Once you have completed all notebooks and filled out the necessary code, you need to follow the below instructions to submit your work:

1. Open collect_submission.ipynb in Colab and execute the notebook cells.

This notebook/script will:

  • Generate a zip file of your code (.py and .ipynb) called a1.zip.
  • Convert all notebooks into a single PDF file.

If your submission for this step was successful, you should see the following display message:

### Done! Please submit a1.zip and the pdfs to Gradescope. ###

2. Submit the PDF and the zip file to Gradescope.

Remember to download a1.zip and assignment.pdf locally before submitting to Gradescope.