[mlpack] GSoC Proposal Discussion: DAG class & InceptionV3 model

[Anwaar khalid]

Hello everyone,

I'm Anwaar Khalid, currently a 4th year dual degree CS student at IIITDM,
India. I've been contributing to mlpack for quite some time now,
particularly in the ANN codebase & I wish to spend the summer working with
mlpack under GSoC-22. I hope to propose a potential idea for a large
project (~350 hours) through this thread & get the community's feedback to
help build my proposal.

I really like the idea of building a DAG class for the ANN module. I've
been researching and found out that MATLAB also has a DAG framework
<https://www.mathworks.com/help/deeplearning/ref/dagnetwork.html> for
building complex neural network architectures. I really like how they have
approached this & I think we can build a similar interface for mlpack. In
PR #2777, Ryan added a `MultiLayer
<https://github.com/zoq/mlpack/blob/ann-vtable/src/mlpack/methods/ann/layer/multi_layer.hpp>`
class which can be used as the vertices of this DAG network. And we can add
an `AddEdge` module which will allow layers to have input from multiple
layers and also redirect their output to multiple layers.

Once the DAG class is built, I can adapt my InceptionV3 layers PR
<https://github.com/mlpack/mlpack/pull/2963> to use that class & then
finally we can add the InceptionV3 model to the models repository. And if
there's time left in the end, I can demonstrate the usage of InceptionV3
model in the examples repo by solving a simple image classification task.

I wanted to get the community's opinions on these ideas. Are the number of
deliverables sufficient for a large sized project? Looking forward to
hearing back from the community :)


Best
Anwaar Khalid
Github Username: hello-fri-end
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