Note
Go to the end to download the full example code.
PyTorch: nn#
Created On: Dec 03, 2020 | Last Updated: Sep 29, 2025 | Last Verified: Nov 05, 2024
A third order polynomial, trained to predict \(y=\sin(x)\) from \(-\pi\) to \(\pi\) by minimizing squared Euclidean distance.
This implementation uses the nn package from PyTorch to build the network. PyTorch autograd makes it easy to define computational graphs and take gradients, but raw autograd can be a bit too low-level for defining complex neural networks; this is where the nn package can help. The nn package defines a set of Modules, which you can think of as a neural network layer that produces output from input and may have some trainable weights.
99 1022.1802978515625
199 686.7949829101562
299 462.7146301269531
399 312.9090881347656
499 212.69467163085938
599 145.6101531982422
699 100.6719741821289
799 70.54719543457031
899 50.337425231933594
999 36.76863479614258
1099 27.651264190673828
1199 21.519664764404297
1299 17.39257049560547
1399 14.612120628356934
1499 12.73715591430664
1599 11.471559524536133
1699 10.616497039794922
1799 10.038167953491211
1899 9.646638870239258
1999 9.381280899047852
Result: y = -0.016341309994459152 + 0.8391954898834229 x + 0.0028191469609737396 x^2 + -0.09083471447229385 x^3
import torch
import math
# Create Tensors to hold input and outputs.
x = torch.linspace(-math.pi, math.pi, 2000)
y = torch.sin(x)
# For this example, the output y is a linear function of (x, x^2, x^3), so
# we can consider it as a linear layer neural network. Let's prepare the
# tensor (x, x^2, x^3).
p = torch.tensor([1, 2, 3])
xx = x.unsqueeze(-1).pow(p)
# In the above code, x.unsqueeze(-1) has shape (2000, 1), and p has shape
# (3,), for this case, broadcasting semantics will apply to obtain a tensor
# of shape (2000, 3)
# Use the nn package to define our model as a sequence of layers. nn.Sequential
# is a Module which contains other Modules, and applies them in sequence to
# produce its output. The Linear Module computes output from input using a
# linear function, and holds internal Tensors for its weight and bias.
# The Flatten layer flatens the output of the linear layer to a 1D tensor,
# to match the shape of `y`.
model = torch.nn.Sequential(
torch.nn.Linear(3, 1),
torch.nn.Flatten(0, 1)
)
# The nn package also contains definitions of popular loss functions; in this
# case we will use Mean Squared Error (MSE) as our loss function.
loss_fn = torch.nn.MSELoss(reduction='sum')
learning_rate = 1e-6
for t in range(2000):
# Forward pass: compute predicted y by passing x to the model. Module objects
# override the __call__ operator so you can call them like functions. When
# doing so you pass a Tensor of input data to the Module and it produces
# a Tensor of output data.
y_pred = model(xx)
# Compute and print loss. We pass Tensors containing the predicted and true
# values of y, and the loss function returns a Tensor containing the
# loss.
loss = loss_fn(y_pred, y)
if t % 100 == 99:
print(t, loss.item())
# Zero the gradients before running the backward pass.
model.zero_grad()
# Backward pass: compute gradient of the loss with respect to all the learnable
# parameters of the model. Internally, the parameters of each Module are stored
# in Tensors with requires_grad=True, so this call will compute gradients for
# all learnable parameters in the model.
loss.backward()
# Update the weights using gradient descent. Each parameter is a Tensor, so
# we can access its gradients like we did before.
with torch.no_grad():
for param in model.parameters():
param -= learning_rate * param.grad
# You can access the first layer of `model` like accessing the first item of a list
linear_layer = model[0]
# For linear layer, its parameters are stored as `weight` and `bias`.
print(f'Result: y = {linear_layer.bias.item()} + {linear_layer.weight[:, 0].item()} x + {linear_layer.weight[:, 1].item()} x^2 + {linear_layer.weight[:, 2].item()} x^3')
Total running time of the script: (0 minutes 0.537 seconds)
