Neuro-symbolic AI by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
An IBM made/pushed term, but that matches Ciro Santilli's general view of how we should move forward AGI.
Ciro's motivation/push for this can be seen e.g. at: Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games.
MLperf v2.1 ResNet by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ubuntu 22.10 setup with tiny dummy manually generated ImageNet and run on ONNX:
sudo apt install pybind11-dev

git clone https://github.com/mlcommons/inference
cd inference
git checkout v2.1

virtualenv -p python3 .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install numpy==1.24.2 pycocotools==2.0.6 onnxruntime==1.14.1 opencv-python==4.7.0.72 torch==1.13.1

cd loadgen
CFLAGS="-std=c++14" python setup.py develop
cd -

cd vision/classification_and_detection
python setup.py develop
wget -q https://zenodo.org/record/3157894/files/mobilenet_v1_1.0_224.onnx
export MODEL_DIR="$(pwd)"
export EXTRA_OPS='--time 10 --max-latency 0.2'

tools/make_fake_imagenet.sh
DATA_DIR="$(pwd)/fake_imagenet" ./run_local.sh onnxruntime mobilenet cpu --accuracy
Last line of output on P51, which appears to contain the benchmark results
TestScenario.SingleStream qps=58.85, mean=0.0138, time=0.136, acc=62.500%, queries=8, tiles=50.0:0.0129,80.0:0.0137,90.0:0.0155,95.0:0.0171,99.0:0.0184,99.9:0.0187
where presumably qps means queries per second, and is the main results we are interested in, the more the better.
Running:
tools/make_fake_imagenet.sh
produces a tiny ImageNet subset with 8 images under fake_imagenet/.
fake_imagenet/val_map.txt contains:
val/800px-Porsche_991_silver_IAA.jpg 817
val/512px-Cacatua_moluccensis_-Cincinnati_Zoo-8a.jpg 89
val/800px-Sardinian_Warbler.jpg 13
val/800px-7weeks_old.JPG 207
val/800px-20180630_Tesla_Model_S_70D_2015_midnight_blue_left_front.jpg 817
val/800px-Welsh_Springer_Spaniel.jpg 156
val/800px-Jammlich_crop.jpg 233
val/782px-Pumiforme.JPG 285
where the numbers are the category indices from ImageNet1k. At gist.github.com/yrevar/942d3a0ac09ec9e5eb3a see e.g.:
  • 817: 'sports car, sport car',
  • 89: 'sulphur-crested cockatoo, Kakatoe galerita, Cacatua galerita',
and so on, so they are coherent with the image names. By quickly looking at the script we see that it just downloads from Wikimedia and manually creates the file.
TODO prepare and test on the actual ImageNet validation set, README says:
Prepare the imagenet dataset to come.
Since that one is undocumented, let's try the COCO dataset instead, which uses COCO 2017 and is also a bit smaller. Note that his is not part of MLperf anymore since v2.1, only ImageNet and open images are used. But still:
wget https://zenodo.org/record/4735652/files/ssd_mobilenet_v1_coco_2018_01_28.onnx
DATA_DIR_BASE=/mnt/data/coco
export DATA_DIR="${DATADIR_BASE}/val2017-300"
mkdir -p "$DATA_DIR_BASE"
cd "$DATA_DIR_BASE"
wget http://images.cocodataset.org/zips/val2017.zip
wget http://images.cocodataset.org/annotations/annotations_trainval2017.zip
unzip val2017.zip
unzip annotations_trainval2017.zip
mv annotations val2017
cd -
cd "$(git-toplevel)"
python tools/upscale_coco/upscale_coco.py --inputs "$DATA_DIR_BASE" --outputs "$DATA_DIR" --size 300 300 --format png
cd -
Now:
./run_local.sh onnxruntime mobilenet cpu --accuracy
fails immediately with:
No such file or directory: '/path/to/coco/val2017-300/val_map.txt
The more plausible looking:
./run_local.sh onnxruntime mobilenet cpu --accuracy --dataset coco-300
first takes a while to preprocess something most likely, which it does only one, and then fails:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/ciro/git/inference/vision/classification_and_detection/python/main.py", line 596, in <module>
    main()
  File "/home/ciro/git/inference/vision/classification_and_detection/python/main.py", line 468, in main
    ds = wanted_dataset(data_path=args.dataset_path,
  File "/home/ciro/git/inference/vision/classification_and_detection/python/coco.py", line 115, in __init__
    self.label_list = np.array(self.label_list)
ValueError: setting an array element with a sequence. The requested array has an inhomogeneous shape after 2 dimensions. The detected shape was (5000, 2) + inhomogeneous part.
Interesting layer skip architecture thing.
Apparently destroyed ImageNet 2015 and became very very famous as such.
ResNet v1 vs v1.5 by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
catalog.ngc.nvidia.com/orgs/nvidia/resources/resnet_50_v1_5_for_pytorch explains:
The difference between v1 and v1.5 is that, in the bottleneck blocks which requires downsampling, v1 has stride = 2 in the first 1x1 convolution, whereas v1.5 has stride = 2 in the 3x3 convolution.
This difference makes ResNet50 v1.5 slightly more accurate (~0.5% top1) than v1, but comes with a small performance drawback (~5% imgs/sec).
CNN convolution kernels are not hardcoded. They are learnt and optimized via backpropagation. You just specify their size! Example in PyTorch you'd do just:
nn.Conv2d(1, 6, kernel_size=(5, 5))
as used for example at: activatedgeek/LeNet-5.
This can also be inferred from: stackoverflow.com/questions/55594969/how-to-visualise-filters-in-a-cnn-with-pytorch where we see that the kernels are not perfectly regular as you'd expected from something hand coded.
activatedgeek/LeNet-5 by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
This repository contains a very clean minimal PyTorch implementation of LeNet-5 for MNIST.
It trains the LeNet-5 neural network on the MNIST dataset from scratch, and afterwards you can give it newly hand-written digits 0 to 9 and it will hopefully recognize the digit for you.
Ciro Santilli created a small fork of this repo at lenet adding better automation for:
Install on Ubuntu 24.10 with:
sudo apt install protobuf-compiler
git clone https://github.com/activatedgeek/LeNet-5
cd LeNet-5
git checkout 95b55a838f9d90536fd3b303cede12cf8b5da47f
virtualenv -p python3 .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install \
  Pillow==6.2.0 \
  numpy==1.24.2 \
  onnx==1.13.1 \
  torch==2.0.0 \
  torchvision==0.15.1 \
  visdom==0.2.4 \
;
We use our own pip install because their requirements.txt uses >= instead of == making it random if things will work or not.
On Ubuntu 22.10 it was instead:
pip install
  Pillow==6.2.0 \
  numpy==1.26.4 \
  onnx==1.17.0 torch==2.6.0 \
  torchvision==0.21.0 \
  visdom==0.2.4 \
;
Then run with:
python run.py
This script:
  • does a fixed 15 epochs on the training data
  • it then uses the trained net from memory to check accuracy with the test data
  • then it also produces a lenet.onnx ONNX file which contains the trained network, nice!
It throws a billion exceptions because we didn't start the Visdom server, but everything works nevertheless, we just don't get a visualization of the training.
The terminal outputs lines such as:
Train - Epoch 1, Batch: 0, Loss: 2.311587
Train - Epoch 1, Batch: 10, Loss: 2.067062
Train - Epoch 1, Batch: 20, Loss: 0.959845
...
Train - Epoch 1, Batch: 230, Loss: 0.071796
Test Avg. Loss: 0.000112, Accuracy: 0.967500
...
Train - Epoch 15, Batch: 230, Loss: 0.010040
Test Avg. Loss: 0.000038, Accuracy: 0.989300
And the runtime on Ubuntu 22.10, P51 was:
real    2m10.262s
user    11m9.771s
sys     0m26.368s
One of the benefits of the ONNX output is that we can nicely visualize the neural network on Netron:
Figure 1.
Netron visualization of the activatedgeek/LeNet-5 ONNX output
. From this we can see the bifurcation on the computational graph as done in the code at:
output = self.c1(img)
x = self.c2_1(output)
output = self.c2_2(output)
output += x
output = self.c3(output)
This doesn't seem to conform to the original LeNet-5 however?
Now let's try and use the trained ONNX file for inference on some manually drawn images on GIMP:
Figure 1.
Number 9 drawn with mouse on GIMP by Ciro Santilli (2023)
.
Note that:
  • the images must be drawn with white on black. If you use black on white, it the accuracy becomes terrible. This is a good very example of brittleness in AI systems!
  • images must be converted to 32x32 for lenet.onnx, as that is what training was done on. The training step converted the 28x28 images to 32x32 as the first thing it does before training even starts
We can try the code adapted from thenewstack.io/tutorial-using-a-pre-trained-onnx-model-for-inferencing/ at lenet/infer.py:
cd lenet
cp ~/git/LeNet-5/lenet.onnx .
wget -O 9.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/Digit_9_hand_drawn_by_Ciro_Santilli_on_GIMP_with_mouse_white_on_black.png
./infer.py 9.png
and it works pretty well! The program outputs:
9
as desired.
We can also try with images directly from Extract MNIST images.
infer_mnist.py lenet.onnx mnist_png/out/testing/1/*.png
and the accuracy is great as expected.
By default, the setup runs on CPU only, not GPU, as could be seen by running htop. But by the magic of PyTorch, modifying the program to run on the GPU is trivial:
cat << EOF | patch
diff --git a/run.py b/run.py
index 104d363..20072d1 100644
--- a/run.py
+++ b/run.py
@@ -24,7 +24,8 @@ data_test = MNIST('./data/mnist',
 data_train_loader = DataLoader(data_train, batch_size=256, shuffle=True, num_workers=8)
 data_test_loader = DataLoader(data_test, batch_size=1024, num_workers=8)

-net = LeNet5()
+device = 'cuda'
+net = LeNet5().to(device)
 criterion = nn.CrossEntropyLoss()
 optimizer = optim.Adam(net.parameters(), lr=2e-3)

@@ -43,6 +44,8 @@ def train(epoch):
     net.train()
     loss_list, batch_list = [], []
     for i, (images, labels) in enumerate(data_train_loader):
+        labels = labels.to(device)
+        images = images.to(device)
         optimizer.zero_grad()

         output = net(images)
@@ -71,6 +74,8 @@ def test():
     total_correct = 0
     avg_loss = 0.0
     for i, (images, labels) in enumerate(data_test_loader):
+        labels = labels.to(device)
+        images = images.to(device)
         output = net(images)
         avg_loss += criterion(output, labels).sum()
         pred = output.detach().max(1)[1]
@@ -84,7 +89,7 @@ def train_and_test(epoch):
     train(epoch)
     test()

-    dummy_input = torch.randn(1, 1, 32, 32, requires_grad=True)
+    dummy_input = torch.randn(1, 1, 32, 32, requires_grad=True).to(device)
     torch.onnx.export(net, dummy_input, "lenet.onnx")

     onnx_model = onnx.load("lenet.onnx")
EOF
and leads to a faster runtime, with less user as now we are spending more time on the GPU than CPU:
real    1m27.829s
user    4m37.266s
sys     0m27.562s

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

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    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
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    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
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    Figure 3.
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    Figure 4.
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    Web editor
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