Building a Neural Network using Keras and TensorFlow in Python

Jeremy Johnson
3 min readJan 16, 2023

--

Photo by DeepMind on Unsplash

Python can make use of artificial intelligence through various libraries and frameworks such as TensorFlow, Keras, and scikit-learn. For example, one can use TensorFlow and Keras to build a neural network for image classification. The model can be trained on a dataset of images, and then used to predict the class of new images. The following is a simple example of building a neural network using Keras and TensorFlow in Python to classify images of handwritten digits:

from tensorflow import keras
from tensorflow.keras import layers
# define the model
model = keras.Sequential()
model.add(layers.Dense(64, activation='relu', input_shape=(784,)))
model.add(layers.Dense(64, activation='relu'))
model.add(layers.Dense(10, activation='softmax'))
# compile the model
model.compile(optimizer='adam', loss='categorical_crossentropy', metrics=['accuracy'])
# train the model on the dataset
(x_train, y_train), (x_test, y_test) = keras.datasets.mnist.load_data()
x_train = x_train.reshape(-1, 784).astype('float32') / 255
x_test = x_test.reshape(-1, 784).astype('float32') / 255
model.fit(x_train, y_train, epochs=5, batch_size=32)

This is a simple example, but it demonstrates how easy it is to use Python with TensorFlow and Keras to train a neural network and make predictions with artificial intelligence.

One advanced example of using Python and artificial intelligence is to train a deep learning model for natural language processing tasks, such as language translation. One popular library for this is the transformer library, which is built on top of TensorFlow and Keras.

Here’s an example of using the transformer library to train a neural machine translation model:

from transformers import T5ForCausalLM, T5Tokenizer
# Load the T5 model and tokenizer
model = T5ForCausalLM.from_pretrained('t5-base')
tokenizer = T5Tokenizer.from_pretrained('t5-base')
# Define the input and output languages
input_lang = "translate English to Spanish: "
output_lang = "translate Spanish to English: "
# Define the input and output texts
input_text = "I am a student"
output_text = "Soy un estudiante"
# Encode the input and output texts
encoded_input = tokenizer.encode(input_lang + input_text, return_tensors='pt')
encoded_output = tokenizer.encode(output_lang + output_text, return_tensors='pt')
# Generate translations
translations = model.generate(encoded_input, max_length=1024)
translated_text = tokenizer.decode(translations[0], skip_special_tokens=True)
print(translated_text)

This example uses the pre-trained T5 model and tokenizer from the transformer library to translate the input text “I am a student” from English to Spanish. The model generates the output text “Soy un estudiante”. This example demonstrates how easy it is to use the transformer library to train advanced models for natural language processing tasks with Python.

Note that, this is just an example to show you how you can use pre-trained transformer models and tokenizer on your task, and, if you want to improve the quality of your translation task you should use large amounts of data and fine tune the pre-trained model on your task and also try other models like BERT, Transformer-XL or GPT-2.

Revolutionize your writing process with AI-powered copywriting software, trusted by over 4,000,000 users, that can help you create high-quality content faster and more efficiently than ever before. More information here.

And there you have it! Many thanks for persisting to the end of this article! Hope you have found it helpful. You can follow me on Medium.

If you like this article don’t forget to give a clap (Pro tip: It’s free).

--

--

Jeremy Johnson

Jeremy Johnson is a Senior Software Engineer with over 14 years of experience in the industry. Skilled in Angular JS, Java, and Python.