Getting Started with PyTorch
Chapter 1: PyTorch Fundamentals and Setup
What is PyTorch?
Installation and Environment Configuration
Introduction to Tensors
Creating Tensors
Basic Tensor Operations
Relationship with NumPy
Hands-on Practical: Setup and Tensor Basics
Quiz for Chapter 1
Chapter 2: Advanced Tensor Manipulations
Tensor Indexing and Slicing
Reshaping and Rearranging Tensors
Joining and Splitting Tensors
Understanding Broadcasting
Tensor Data Types
CPU vs GPU Tensors
Practice: Tensor Manipulation Techniques
Quiz for Chapter 2
Chapter 3: Automatic Differentiation with Autograd
The Concept of Automatic Differentiation
PyTorch Computation Graphs
Tensors and Gradient Calculation (
requires_grad)Performing Backpropagation (
backward())Accessing Gradients (
.grad)Disabling Gradient Tracking
Gradient Accumulation
Hands-on Practical: Autograd Exploration
Quiz for Chapter 3
Chapter 4: Building Models with
torch.nnThe
torch.nn.Module Base ClassDefining Custom Network Architectures
Common Layers: Linear, Convolutional, Recurrent
Activation Functions (ReLU, Sigmoid, Tanh)
Sequential Containers for Simple Models
Loss Functions (
torch.nn losses)Optimizers (
torch.optim)Practice: Building a Simple Network
Quiz for Chapter 4
Chapter 5: Efficient Data Handling
The Need for Specialized Data Loaders
Working with
torch.utils.data.DatasetBuilt-in Datasets (e.g., TorchVision)
Data Transformations (
torchvision.transforms)Using
torch.utils.data.DataLoaderCustomizing DataLoader Behavior
Hands-on Practical: Creating a Data Pipeline
Quiz for Chapter 5
Chapter 6: Implementing the Training Loop
Anatomy of a Training Loop
Setting Up the Model, Loss, and Optimizer
Iterating Through Data with DataLoader
The Forward Pass: Getting Predictions
Calculating the Loss
Backpropagation: Computing Gradients
Updating Weights with the Optimizer
Zeroing Gradients
Implementing an Evaluation Loop
Saving and Loading Model Checkpoints
Hands-on Practical: Complete Training Routine
Quiz for Chapter 6
Chapter 7: Introduction to Common Architectures
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) Overview
Building a Simple CNN in PyTorch
Understanding Input/Output Shapes for CNN Layers
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) Overview
Building a Simple RNN in PyTorch
Handling Sequential Data Input for RNNs
Brief Mention of LSTM and GRU
Practice: Implementing Basic CNN and RNN
Quiz for Chapter 7
Chapter 8: Monitoring and Debugging Models
Common Errors in PyTorch Development
Debugging Shape Mismatches
Checking Device Placement (CPU/GPU)
Inspecting Gradients for Issues (Vanishing/Exploding)
Visualizing Training Progress with TensorBoard
Logging Metrics during Training/Evaluation
Using Python Debugger (pdb) with PyTorch
Practice: Debugging and Visualization
Quiz for Chapter 8
Inspecting Gradients for Issues (Vanishing/Exploding)
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- Deep Learning, Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville, 2016 (MIT Press) - A comprehensive textbook that provides a thorough theoretical background on deep learning, including detailed explanations of backpropagation, vanishing/exploding gradients, and various mitigation strategies.
- Autograd mechanics, PyTorch Contributors, 2023 (PyTorch) - Official PyTorch documentation detailing how gradients are computed, stored, and accessed using the Autograd system, which is essential for detecting and debugging gradient issues.
- Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift, Sergey Ioffe and Christian Szegedy, 2015 Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Vol. 37 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1502.03167 - Introduces Batch Normalization, a technique widely adopted to stabilize and speed up the training of deep neural networks by normalizing layer inputs, thereby helping to mitigate vanishing/exploding gradients.
- Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition, Kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, and Jian Sun, 2016 Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (IEEE) DOI: 10.1109/CVPR.2016.90 - Presents Residual Networks (ResNets) with skip connections, a foundational architecture that effectively addresses the vanishing gradient problem in very deep networks by providing alternative gradient paths.