Building a Neural Network from Scratch: Implementation, Evaluation, and Optimization

arXiv:2607.16682 · cs.LG, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-07-18 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-07-18

Updated: 2026-09-17

Code: https://github.com/yuanzhe-jia/neural-network

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Activation Function — 18× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adam — 17× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 15× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Generalization — 9× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Regularization — 7× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Loss Function — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Modularity — 2× in this paper · explained in 9 episodes
• Ablation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Ablation Studies — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Covariate Shift — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ensemble Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Feature Extraction — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Sparsity — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Transformer — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)
• Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization

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