Building a CNN model from scratch
For this example, let's build our own architecture from scratch. Our network architecture will contain a combination of different layers, namely:
Conv2d
MaxPool2d
- Rectified linear unit (ReLU)
- View
- Linear layer
Let's look at a pictorial representation of the architecture we are going to implement:

Let's implement this architecture in PyTorch and then walk through what each individual layer does:
class Net(nn.Module): def __init__(self): super().__init__() self.conv1 = nn.Conv2d(1, 10, kernel_size=5) self.conv2 = nn.Conv2d(10, 20, kernel_size=5) self.conv2_drop = nn.Dropout2d() self.fc1 = nn.Linear(320, 50) self.fc2 = nn.Linear(50, 10) def forward(self, x): x = F.relu(F.max_pool2d(self.conv1(x), 2)) x = F.relu(F.max_pool2d(self.conv2_drop(self.conv2(x)), 2)) x = x.view(-1, 320) x = F.relu(self.fc1(x)) x = F.dropout(x, training=self.training) x = self.fc2(x) ...