标签：#neuralnetworks

Training a network from scratch in raw NumPy, quantizing it to int8, and running it as ~80 lines of dependency-free JavaScript — with a parity test proving the browser matches Python to 1e-6. Why bother? MNIST is a solved problem Digit recognition is the "hello world" of ML — that's exactly why I used it. The model isn't the point. The point is everything around the model, which happens to be the part that matters in production work too: training without a framework, compressing for deployment, running inference in a constrained environment, and proving the deployed system matches the trained one. Training: just NumPy and math The network is a 784→128→64→10 MLP — hand-written forward pass, backpropagation, and Adam optimizer. No autograd, no framework: # backward pass, by hand dz3 = ( probs - y_batch ) / batch_size grads_w [ 2 ] = a2 . T @ dz3 da2 = dz3 @ weights [ 2 ]. T dz2 = da2 * ( z2 > 0 ) # ReLU mask grads_w [ 1 ] = a1 . T @ dz2 ... One trick that matters for a drawing demo specifically: shift augmentation . MNIST digits are centered; humans draw wherever they like. Training on randomly translated copies makes the model tolerant of sloppy placement. Combined with MNIST-style preprocessing at inference (crop to bounding box, scale into a 20×20 box, center by center-of-mass), real-world doodles classify reliably. Final test accuracy: 98.2% . Compression: int8 in 15 lines A float32 weight file would be ~430 KB. Symmetric int8 quantization cuts it ~4×: scale = np . abs ( w ). max () / 127.0 q = np . clip ( np . round ( w / scale ), - 127 , 127 ). astype ( np . int8 ) One scale factor per layer, weights stored as base64 in JSON: 145 KB total , and quantized test accuracy is identical to float — 98.2%. Inference: ~80 lines of plain JavaScript In the browser, the weights are dequantized once on load, and inference is three matrix-vector products with ReLU and a softmax. ~109K multiply-adds — about a microsecond-scale problem for any modern device. No TensorFlow.js (t