CNN : Fine tuning small network vs feature extracting from a big network - tensorflow

To elaborate : Under what circumstances would fine tuning all layers of a small network (say SqueezeNet) perform better than feature extracting or fine tuning only last 1 or 2 Convolution layer of a big network (e.g inceptionV4)?
My understanding is computing resource required for both is somewhat comparable. And I remember reading in a paper that extreme options i.e fine tuning 90% or 10% of network is far better compared to more moderate like 50%. So, what should be the default choice when experimenting extensively is not an option?
Any past experiments and intuitive description of their result, research paper or blog would be specially helpful. Thanks.

I don't have much experience in training models like SqueezeNet, but I think it is much easier to finetune only the last 1 or 2 layers of a big network: you don't have to extensively search for many optimal hyperparameters. Transfer learning works amazingly well out of the box with the LR finder and the cyclical learning rate from fast.ai.
If you want fast inference after the training, then it is preferable to train SqueezeNet. It might also be the case if the new task is very different from ImageNet.
Some intuition from http://cs231n.github.io/transfer-learning/
New dataset is small and similar to original dataset. Since the data is small, it is not a good idea to fine-tune the ConvNet due to overfitting concerns. Since the data is similar to the original data, we expect higher-level features in the ConvNet to be relevant to this dataset as well. Hence, the best idea might be to train a linear classifier on the CNN codes.
New dataset is large and similar to the original dataset. Since we have more data, we can have more confidence that we won’t overfit if we were to try to fine-tune through the full network.
New dataset is small but very different from the original dataset. Since the data is small, it is likely best to only train a linear classifier. Since the dataset is very different, it might not be best to train the classifier form the top of the network, which contains more dataset-specific features. Instead, it might work better to train the SVM classifier from activations somewhere earlier in the network.
New dataset is large and very different from the original dataset. Since the dataset is very large, we may expect that we can afford to train a ConvNet from scratch. However, in practice it is very often still beneficial to initialize with weights from a pretrained model. In this case, we would have enough data and confidence to fine-tune through the entire network.

Related

How to create a dataset for image classification

I trained a model using images I gathered from the web. Then, when inferences were made using images newly collected from the web, performance was poor.
I am wondering how I can improve my dataset using misclassified images. Can I add all the misclassified images to the training dataset? And then do I have to collect new images?
[Edit]
I added some of the misclassified images to the training dataset, although the performance evaluation got better.
It might be worth if you could provide more info on how you trained your model, and your network architecture.
However this are some general guidelines:
You can try to diversify your images in your train set by, yes, adding new images. The more different examples you provide to your network, the higher the chance that they will be similar to images you want to obtain prediction from.
Do data augmentation, it is pretty straightforward and usually improves quite a bit the accuracy. You can have a look at this Tensorflow tutorial for Data Augmentation. If you don’t know what data augmentation is, basically is a technique to perform minor changes to your images, that is by rotating the image a bit, resizing etc. This way the model is trained to learn your images even with slight changes, which usually makes it more robust to new images.
You could consider doing Transfer Learning. The main idea here is to leverage a model that has learned on a huge dataset and use it to fine-tune your specific problem. In the tutorial I linked they show the typical workflow of transfer learning, by taking a model pretrained on the ImageNet dataset (the huge dataset), and retraining it on the Kaggle "cats vs dogs" classification dataset (a smaller dataset, like the one you could have).

How to improve the performance of CNN Model for a specific Dataset? Getting Low Accuracy on both training and Testing Dataset

We were given an assignment in which we were supposed to implement our own neural network, and two other already developed Neural Networks. I have done that and however, this isn't the requirement of the assignment but I still would want to know that what are the steps/procedure I can follow to improve the accuracy of my Models?
I am fairly new to Deep Learning and Machine Learning as a whole so do not have much idea.
The given dataset contains a total of 15 classes (airplane, chair etc.) and we are provided with about 15 images of each class in training dataset. The testing dataset has 10 images of each class.
Complete github repository of my code can be found here (Jupyter Notebook file): https://github.com/hassanashas/Deep-Learning-Models
I tried it out with own CNN first (made one using Youtube tutorials).
Code is as follows,
X_train = X_train/255.0
model = Sequential()
model.add(Conv2D(64, (3, 3), input_shape = X_train.shape[1:]))
model.add(Activation("relu"))
model.add(MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2, 2)))
model.add(Conv2D(128, (3, 3)))
model.add(Activation("relu"))
model.add(MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2, 2)))
model.add(Flatten())
model.add(Dense(64))
model.add(Dense(16)) # added 16 because it model.fit gave error on 15
model.add(Activation('softmax'))
For the compiling of Model,
from tensorflow.keras.optimizers import SGD
model.compile(loss='sparse_categorical_crossentropy',
optimizer=SGD(learning_rate=0.01),
metrics=['accuracy'])
I used sparse categorical crossentropy because my "y" label was intenger values, ranging from 1 to 15.
I ran this model with following way,
model_fit = model.fit(X_train, y_train, batch_size=32, epochs=30, validation_split=0.1)
It gave me an accuracy of 0.2030 on training dataset and only 0.0733 on the testing dataset (both the datasets are present in the github repository)
Then, I tried out the AlexNet CNN (followed a Youtube tutorial for its code)
I ran the AlexNet on the same dataset for 15 epochs. It improved the accuracy on training dataset to 0.3317, however accuracy on testing dataset was even worse than my own CNN, at only 0.06
Afterwards, I tried out the VGG16 CNN, again following a Youtube Tutorial.
I ran the code on Google Colab for 10 Epochs. It managed to improve to 100% accuracy on training dataset in the 8th epoch. But this model gave the worst accuracy of all three on testing dataset with only 0.0533
I am unable to understand this contrasting behavior of all these models. I have tried out different epoch values, loss functions etc. but the current ones gave the best result relatively. My own CNN was able to get to 100% accuracy when I ran it on 100 epochs (however, it gave very poor results on the testing dataset)
What can I do to improve the performance of these Models? And specifically, what are the few crucial things that one should always try to follow in order to improve efficiency of a Deep Learning Model? I have looked up multiple similar questions on Stackoverflow but almost all of them were working on datasets provided by the tensorflow like mnist dataset and etc. and I didn't find much help from those.
Disclaimer: it's been a few years since I've played with CNNs myself, so I can only pass on some general advice and suggestions.
First of all, I would like to talk about the results you've gotten so far. The first two networks you've trained seem to at least learn something from the training data because they perform better than just randomly guessing.
However: the performance on the test data indicates that the network has not learned anything meaningful because those numbers suggest the network is as good as (or only marginally better than) a random guess.
As for the third network: high accuracy for training data combined with low accuracy for testing data means that your network has overfitted. This means that the network has memorized the training data but has not learned any meaningful patterns.
There's no point in continuing to train a network that has started overfitting. So once the training accuracy increases and testing accuracy decreases for a few epochs consecutively, you can stop training.
Increase the dataset size
Neural networks rely on loads of good training data to learn patterns from. Your dataset contains 15 classes with 15 images each, that is very little training data.
Of course, it would be great if you could get hold of additional high-quality training data to expand your dataset, but that is not always feasible. So a different approach is to artificially expand your dataset. You can easily do this by applying a bunch of transformations to the original training data. Think about: mirroring, rotating, zooming, and cropping.
Remember to not just apply these transformations willy-nilly, they must make sense! For example, if you want a network to recognize a chair, do you also want it to recognize chairs that are upside down? Or for detecting road signs: mirroring them makes no sense because the text, numbers, and graphics will never appear mirrored in real life.
From the brief description of the classes you have (planes and chairs and whatnot...), I think mirroring horizontally could be the best transformation to apply initially. That will already double your training dataset size.
Also, keep in mind that an artificially inflated dataset is never as good as one of the same size that contains all authentic, real images. A mirrored image contains much of the same information as its original, we merely hope it will delay the network from overfitting and hope that it will learn the important patterns instead.
Lower the learning rate
This is a bit of side note, but try lowering the learning rate. Your network seems to overfit in only a few epochs which is very fast. Obviously, lowering the learning rate will not combat overfitting but it will happen more slowly. This means that you can hopefully find an epoch with better overall performance before overfitting takes place.
Note that a lower learning rate will never magically make a bad-performing network good. It's just one way to locate a set of parameters that performs a tad bit better.
Randomize the training data order
During training, the training data is presented in batches to the network. This often happens in a fixed order over all iterations. This may lead to certain biases in the network.
First of all, make sure that the training data is shuffled at least once. You do not want to present the classes one by one, for example first all plane images, then all chairs, etc... This could lead to the network unlearning much of the first class by the end of each epoch.
Also, reshuffle the training data between epochs. This will again avoid potential minor biases because of training data order.
Improve the network design
You've designed a convolutional neural network with only two convolution layers and two fully connected layers. Maybe this model is too shallow to learn to differentiate between the different classes.
Know that the convolution layers tend to first pick up small visual features and then tend to combine these in higher level patterns. So maybe adding a third convolution layer may help the network identify more meaningful patterns.
Obviously, network design is something you'll have to experiment with and making networks overly deep or complex is also a pitfall to watch out for!

Can I use EfficientNetB7 as my baseline model for image recognition?

I have seen many articles that used EfficientNetB0 as their baseline model, but I never saw anyone used EfficientNetB7 yet. From the EfficientNet Github page (https://github.com/qubvel/efficientnet) I saw that EfficientNetB7 achieved a very high accuracy result. Why doesn't everyone just use EfficientNetB7? Is it because of the memory limit or is there any other consideration to use EfficientNetB0?
A baseline is the result of a very basic model or approach to a problem. It is used to compare performance of more complex methods such as larger models, feature engineering or data augmentation.
EfficientNetB0 is used as it is a reliable model for somewhat good accuracy and because it is fast to train due to a low number of parameters.
Using EfficentNetB7 could serve as a baseline model, however when testing non-architecture related changes, such as data augmentation as mentioned earlier, retraining the large network will take longer slowing down your iteration speed.

Training SSD-MOBILENET V1 and the loss does not deacrease

I'm new in everithing about CNN and tensorflow. Im training a pretrained ssd-mobilenev1-pets.config to detect columns of buildings, about one day but the loss is between 2-1 and doesnt decrease since 10 hours ago.
I realized that my input images are 128x128 and SSD resize de image to 300*300.
Does the size of the input images affect the training?
If that is the case, should I retrain the network with larger input images? or what would be another option to decrease the loss? my train dataset has 660 images and test 166 I dont Know if there are enough images
I really aprecciate your help ....
Loss values of ssd_mobilenet can be different from faster_rcnn. From EdjeElectronics' TensorFlow Object Detection Tutorial:
For my training on the Faster-RCNN-Inception-V2 model, it started at
about 3.0 and quickly dropped below 0.8. I recommend allowing your
model to train until the loss consistently drops below 0.05, which
will take about 40,000 steps, or about 2 hours (depending on how
powerful your CPU and GPU are). Note: The loss numbers will be
different if a different model is used. MobileNet-SSD starts with a
loss of about 20, and should be trained until the loss is consistently
under 2.
For more information: https://github.com/EdjeElectronics/TensorFlow-Object-Detection-API-Tutorial-Train-Multiple-Objects-Windows-10#6-run-the-training
The SSD Mobilnet architecture demands additional training to suffice
the loss accuracy values of the R-CNN model, however, offers
practicality, scalability, and easy accessibility on smaller devices
which reveals the SSD model as a promising candidate for further
assessment (Fleury and Fleury, 2018).
For more information: Fleury, D. & Fleury, A. (2018). Implementation of Regional-CNN and SSD machine learning object detection architectures for the real time analysis of blood borne pathogens in dark field microscopy. MDPI AG.
I would recommend you to take 15%-20% images for testing which cover all the variety present in training data. As you said you have 650+ images for training and 150+ for testing. That is roughly 25% of testing images. It looks like you have enough images to start with. I know the more, the merrier but make sure your model also has sufficient data to learn from!
Resizing the images does not contribute to the loss. It makes sure there is consistency across all images for the model to recognize them without bias. The loss has nothing to do with image resizing as long as every image is resized identically.
You have to make stops and recover checkpoints again and again if you want your model to be perfectly fit. Usually, you can get away with good accuracy by re-training the ssd mobilenet until the loss consistently becomes under 1.Ideally we want the loss to be as lower as possible but we want to make sure the model is not over-fitting. It is all about trial and error. (Loss between 0.5 and 1 seems to be doing the job well but again it all depends on you.)
The reason I think your model is underperforming is due to the fact that you have variety of testing data and not enough training data to suffice.
The model has not been given enough knowledge in training data to make the model learn for new variety of testing data. (For example : Your test data has some images of new angles of buildings which are not sufficiently present in training data). In that case, I recommend you to put variety of all images in training data and then picking images to test making sure you still have sufficient training data of new postures. That's why I recommend you to take 15%-20% test data.

Best case to use tensorflow

I followed all the steps mentioned in the article:
https://stackabuse.com/tensorflow-2-0-solving-classification-and-regression-problems/
Then I compared the results with Linear Regression and found that the error is less (68) than the tensorflow model (84).
from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression
logreg_clf = LinearRegression()
logreg_clf.fit(X_train, y_train)
pred = logreg_clf.predict(X_test)
print(np.sqrt(mean_squared_error(y_test, pred)))
Does this mean that if I have large dataset, I will get better results than linear regression?
What is the best situation - when I should be using tensorflow?
Answering your first question, Neural Networks are notoriously known for overfitting on smaller datasets, and here you are comparing the performance of a simple linear regression model with a neural network with two hidden layers on the testing data set, so it's not very surprising to see that the MLP model falling behind (assuming that you are working with relatively a smaller dataset) the linear regression model. Larger datasets will definitely help neural networks in learning more accurate parameters and generalize the phenomena well.
Now coming to your second question, Tensorflow is basically a library for building deep learning models, so whenever you are working on a deep learning problem like image recognition, Natural Language Processing, etc. you need massive computational power and will be processing a ton of data to train your models, and this is where TensorFlow becomes handy, it offers you GPU support which will significantly boost your training process which otherwise becomes practically impossible. Moreover, if you are building a product that has to be deployed in a production environment for it to be consumed, you can make use of TensorFlow Serving which helps you to take your models much closer to the customers.