Drawing the Four Neural Networks that Changed AI

Author(s): Jake Manger

Originally published on Towards AI.

Making beautiful visualizations and writing about AI’s most influential models with PlotNeuralNet
A diagram of LeNet-5 generated with PlotNeuralNet. Image by Author.

I’ve recently been writing a paper where we developed a new model architecture and I wanted a nice way of representing it in a figure. My first instinct was to jump into Adobe Illustrator. I fiddled around with the vertices of my fourth cube feebly trying to get the perspective right. That’s when it hit me: “I’m a programmer. Surely, there’s a tool out there for this.”

After scouring countless Github repositories, I stumbled upon a real gem that made my earlier attempts look like child’s play. It got me inspired to generate diagrams of some of history’s most influential neural networks and write a bit about them and their authors in this article.

If you too want to create your own diagrams of these architectures, I’ll also show you how to use the PlotNeuralNet package to generate them.

This article is broken up into the following four parts. Feel free to jump around to a section relevant to you. If you just want to read about a history of neural networks, then skip the installation step, and start reading!

InstallationGenerating LeNet-5 — the network that showed deep learning could beat out traditional machine learning… Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI