What is the difference in training if one uses more epochs or more layers?
Should these train equally, assuming consistent hyperparams?
for epoch in range(20):
LSTM
and
for epoch in range(5):
LSTM -> LSTM -> LSTM -> LSTM
I understand that there would be a difference after training. In the first case, you would send any test batch through one trained LSTM cell, while in the 2nd case, it would go through 4 trained cells. My question pertains to training.
Seems they should be identical.
I think you make a big confusion between very different concepts. Let's us go back to the basics. Very simply, in a supervised machine learning experiment you have some training data X, and a model. A model is like a function with internal parameters, you give it some data and it gives you back a prediction. Here, let us say our model has one layer, which is an LSTM. That means the parameters of our model are the parameters of the LSTM (I won't go into what they are, if you don't know them you should read the paper introducing LSTMs).
What is an epoch: very roughly, "training for n epochs" means looping n times on the training data. You show each example n times to the model for update. The more epochs the more you get your network acustomed to your training data. (I'm being very overly simplistic).
I hope it is clearer now that epochs and layers are in no way related to the layers. The layers are what your model is made of, and the epochs is about how many times you will show your examples to the model.
If you put 5 LSTM layers, you will just have 5 times more parameters. But in any case, each of your training examples will go through the 1 or 5 stacked LSTM layers...
Related
I'm working on a short project that involves implementing a character RNN for text generation. My model uses a single LSTM layer with varying units (messing around with between 50 and 500), dropout at a rate of 0.2, and softmax activation. I'm using RMSprop with a learning rate of 0.01.
My issue is that I can't find a good way to characterize the validation loss. I'm using a validation split of 0.3 and I'm finding that the validation loss starts to become constant after only a few epochs (maybe 2-5 or so) while the training loss keeps decreasing. Does validation loss carry much weight in this sort of problem? The purpose of the model is to generate new strings, so quantifying the validation loss with other strings seems... pointless?
It's hard for me to really find the best model since qualitatively I get the sense that the best model is trained for more epochs than it takes for the validation loss to stop changing but also for fewer epochs than it takes for the training loss to start increasing. I would really appreciate any advice you have regarding this problem as well as any general advice about RNN's for text generation, especially regarding dropout and overfitting. Thanks!
This is the code for fitting the model for every epoch. The callback is a custom callback that just prints a few tests. I'm now realizing that history_callback.history['loss'] is probably the training loss isn't it...
for i in range(num_epochs):
history_callback = model.fit(x, y,
batch_size=128,
epochs=1,
callbacks=[print_callback],
validation_split=0.3)
loss_history.append(history_callback.history['loss'])
validation_loss_history.append(history_callback.history['val_loss'])
My intention for this model isn't to replicate sentences from the training data, rather, I'd like to generate sentence from the same distribution that I'm training on.
Yes history_callback.history['loss'] is Training Loss and history_callback.history['val_loss'] is the Validation Loss.
Yes, Validation Loss carries weight in this sort of problem because you just don't want to replicate the sentences which are given during Training but you want to learn the patterns from the Training Data and generate new sentences when it sees a new data.
From the information you mentioned in the question and from the insights identified from comments (thanks to Brian Bartoldson), it is understood that your model is overfitting. In addition to EarlyStopping and dropout, you can try the below mentioned techniques to mitigate overfitting problem.
3.a. Shuffle the Data, by using shuffle=True in model.fit. Code is shown below
3.b. Use recurrent_dropout. For example, If we set the value of Recurrent Dropout as 0.2 in a Recurrent Layer (LSTM), it means that it will consider only 80% of the Time Steps for that Recurrent Layer (LSTM).
3.c. Use Regularization. You can try l1 Regularization or l1_l2 Regularization as well for the arguments, kernel_regularizer, recurrent_regularizer, bias_regularizer, activity_regularizer of the LSTM Layer.
Sample code to use Shuffle, Early Stopping, Recurrent_Dropout, Regularization is shown below:
from tensorflow.keras.regularizers import l2
from tensorflow.keras.models import Sequential
model = Sequential()
Regularizer = l2(0.001)
model.add(tf.keras.layers.LSTM(units = 50, activation='relu',kernel_regularizer=Regularizer ,
recurrent_regularizer=Regularizer , bias_regularizer=Regularizer , activity_regularizer=Regularizer, dropout=0.2, recurrent_dropout=0.3))
callback = tf.keras.callbacks.EarlyStopping(monitor='val_loss', patience=15)
history_callback = model.fit(x, y,
batch_size=128,
epochs=1,
callbacks=[print_callback, callback],
validation_split=0.3, shuffle = True)
Hope this helps. Happy Learning!
I am training an autoencoder DNN for a regression question. Need suggestions on how to improve the training process.
The total number of training sample is about ~100,000. I use Keras to fit the model, setting validation_split = 0.1. After training, I drew loss function change and got the following picture. As can be seen here, validation loss is unstable and mean values are very close to training loss.
My question is: based on this, what is the next step I should try to improve the training process?
[Edit on 1/26/2019]
The details of network architecture are as follows:
It has 1 latent layer of 50 nodes. The input and output layer have 1000 nodes,respectively. The activation of hidden layer is ReLU. Loss function is MSE. For optimizer, I use Adadelta with default parameter settings. I also tried to set lr=0.5, but got very similar results. Different features of the data have scaled between -10 and 10, with mean of 0.
By observing the graph provided, the network could not approximate the function which establishes a relation between the input and output.
If your features are too diverse. That one of them is large and others have a very small value, then you should normalize the feature vector. You can read more here.
For a better training and testing result, you can follow these tips,
Use a small network. A network with one hidden layer is enough.
Perform activations in the input as well as hidden layers. The output layer must have a linear function. Use ReLU activation function.
Prefer small learning rate like 0.001. Use RMSProp optimizer. It works fine on most regression problems.
If you are not using mean squared error function, use it.
Try slow and steady learning and not fast learning.
So I was reading the tensorflow getstarted tutorial and I found it very hard to follow. There were a lot of explanations missing about each function and why they are necesary (or not).
In the tf.estimator section, what's the meaning or what are they supposed to be the "x_eval" and "y_eval" arrays? The x_train and y_train arrays give the desired output (which is the corresponding y coordinate) for a given x coordinate. But the x_eval and y_eval values are incorrect: for x=5, y should be -4, not -4.1. Where do those values come from? What do x_eval and y_eval mean? Are they necesary? How did they choose those values?
The difference between "input_fn" (what does "fn" even mean?) and "train_input_fn". I see that the only difference is one has
num_epochs=None, shuffle=True
num_epochs=1000, shuffle=False
but I don't understand what "input_fn" or "train_input_fn" are/do, or what's the difference between the two, or if both are necesary.
3.In the
estimator.train(input_fn=input_fn, steps=1000)
piece of code, I don't understand the difference between "steps" and "num_epochs". What's the meaning of each one? Can you have num_epochs=1000 and steps=1000 too?
The final question is, how do i get the W and the b? In the previous way of doing it (not using tf.estimator) they explicitelly found that W=-1 and b=1. If I was doing a more complex neural network, involving biases and weights, I think I would want to recover the actual values of the weights and biases. That's the whole point of why I'm using tensorflow, to find the weights! So how do I recover them in the tf.estimator example?
These are just some of the questions that bugged me while reading the "getStarted" tutorial. I personally think it leaves a lot to desire, since it's very unclear what each thing does and you can at best guess.
I agree with you that the tf.estimator is not very well introduced in this "getting started" tutorial. I also think that some machine learning background would help with understanding what happens in the tutorial.
As for the answers to your questions:
In machine learning, we usually minimizer the loss of the model on the training set, and then we evaluate the performance of the model on the evaluation set. This is because it is easy to overfit the training set and get 100% accuracy on it, so using a separate validation set makes it impossible to cheat in this way.
Here (x_train, y_train) corresponds to the training set, where the global minimum is obtained for W=-1, b=1.
The validation set (x_eval, y_eval) doesn't have to perfectly follow the distribution of the training set. Although we can get a loss of 0 on the training set, we obtain a small loss on the validation set because we don't have exactly y_eval = - x_eval + 1
input_fn means "input function". This is to indicate that the object input_fn is a function.
In tf.estimator, you need to provide an input function if you want to train the estimator (estimator.train()) or evaluate it (estimator.evaluate()).
Usually you want different transformations for training or evaluation, so you have two functions train_input_fn and eval_input_fn (the input_fn in the tutorial is almost equivalent to train_input_fn and is just confusing).
For instance, during training we want to train for multiple epochs (i.e. multiple times on the dataset). For evaluation, we only need one pass over the validation data to compute the metrics we need
The number of epochs is the number of times we repeat the entire dataset. For instance if we train for 10 epochs, the model will see each input 10 times.
When we train a machine learning model, we usually use mini-batches of data. For instance if we have 1,000 images, we can train on batches of 100 images. Therefore, training for 10 epochs means training on 100 batches of data.
Once the estimator is trained, you can access the list of variables through estimator.get_variable_names() and the value of a variable through estimator.get_variable_value().
Usually we never need to do that, as we can for instance use the trained estimator to predict on new examples, using estimator.predict().
If you feel that the getting started is confusing, you can always submit a GitHub issue to tell the TensorFlow team and explain your point.
I am trying to use ConvLSTM layers in Keras 2 to train an action recognition model. The model has 3 ConvLSTM layers and 2 Fully Connected ones.
At each and every epoch the accuracy for the first batch (usually more than one) is zero and then it increases to some amount more than the previous epoch. For example, the first epoch finishes at 0.3 and the next would finish at 0.4 and so on.
My question is why does it get back to zero at each epoch?
p.s.
The ConvLSTM is stateless.
The model is compiled with SGD(lr=0.001, decay=1e-6, momentum=0.9, nesterov=True), for some reason it does not converge using Adam.
So - in order to understand why something like this happening you need to understand how keras computes accuracy during the batch computation:
Before each batch - a number of positively classified examples is stored.
After each batch - a number of positively classified examples is stored and it's printed after division by all examples used in training.
As your accuracy is pretty low it's highly probable that in a first few batches none of the examples will be classified properly. Especially when you have a small batch. This makes accuracy to be 0 at the beginning of your training.
I am using Keras with TensorFlow backend to train CNN models.
What is the between model.fit() and model.evaluate()? Which one should I ideally use? (I am using model.fit() as of now).
I know the utility of model.fit() and model.predict(). But I am unable to understand the utility of model.evaluate(). Keras documentation just says:
It is used to evaluate the model.
I feel this is a very vague definition.
fit() is for training the model with the given inputs (and corresponding training labels).
evaluate() is for evaluating the already trained model using the validation (or test) data and the corresponding labels. Returns the loss value and metrics values for the model.
predict() is for the actual prediction. It generates output predictions for the input samples.
Let us consider a simple regression example:
# input and output
x = np.random.uniform(0.0, 1.0, (200))
y = 0.3 + 0.6*x + np.random.normal(0.0, 0.05, len(y))
Now lets apply a regression model in keras:
# A simple regression model
model = Sequential()
model.add(Dense(1, input_shape=(1,)))
model.compile(loss='mse', optimizer='rmsprop')
# The fit() method - trains the model
model.fit(x, y, nb_epoch=1000, batch_size=100)
Epoch 1000/1000
200/200 [==============================] - 0s - loss: 0.0023
# The evaluate() method - gets the loss statistics
model.evaluate(x, y, batch_size=200)
# returns: loss: 0.0022612824104726315
# The predict() method - predict the outputs for the given inputs
model.predict(np.expand_dims(x[:3],1))
# returns: [ 0.65680361],[ 0.70067143],[ 0.70482892]
In Deep learning you first want to train your model. You take your data and split it into two sets: the training set, and the test set. It seems pretty common that 80% of your data goes into your training set and 20% goes into your test set.
Your training set gets passed into your call to fit() and your test set gets passed into your call to evaluate(). During the fit operation a number of rows of your training data are fed into your neural net (based on your batch size). After every batch is sent the fit algorithm does back propagation to adjust the weights in your neural net.
After this is done your neural net is trained. The problem is sometimes your neural net gets overfit which is a condition where it performs well for the training set but poorly for other data. To guard against this situation you run the evaluate() function to send new data (your test set) through your neural net to see how it performs with data it has never seen. There is no training occurring, this is purely a test. If all goes well then the score from training is similar to the score from testing.
fit(): Trains the model for a given number of epochs (this is for training time, with the training dataset).
predict(): Generates output predictions for the input samples (this is for somewhere between training and testing time).
evaluate(): Returns the loss value & metrics values for the model in test mode (this is for testing time, with the testing dataset).
While all the above answers explain what these functions : fit(), evaluate() or predict() do however more important point to keep in mind in my opinion is what data you should use for fit() and evaluate().
The most clear guideline that I came across in Machine Learning Mastery and particular quote in there:
Training set: A set of examples used for learning, that is to fit the parameters of the classifier.
Validation set: A set of examples used to tune the parameters of a classifier, for example to choose the number of hidden units in a neural network.
Test set: A set of examples used only to assess the performance of a fully-specified classifier.
: By Brian Ripley, page 354, Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks, 1996
You should not use the same data that you used to train(tune) the model (validation data) for evaluating the performance (generalization) of your fully trained model (evaluate).
The test data used for evaluate() should be unseen/not used for training(fit()) in order to be any reliable indicator of model evaluation (for generlization).
For Predict() you can use just one or few example(s) that you choose (from anywhere) to get quick check or answer from your model. I don't believe it can be used as sole parameter for generalization.
One thing which was not mentioned here, I believe needs to be specified. model.evaluate() returns a list which contains a loss figure and an accuracy figure. What has not been said in the answers above, is that the "loss" figure is the sum of ALL the losses calculated for each item in the x_test array. x_test would contain your test data and y_test would contain your labels. It should be clear that the loss figure is the sum of ALL the losses, not just one loss from one item in the x_test array.
I would say the mean of losses incurred from all iterations, not the sum. But sure, that's the most important information here, otherwise the modeler would be slightly confused.