Training object detectors from scratch leads to really bad performance - tensorflow

I am trying to train a Faster-RCNN network with Inception-v3 architecture (reference paper: Google's paper) as my fixed feature extractor using keras on my own dataset (number of classes = 4) which is very different compared to the Image-net. Still I initialized it with Image-net weights because this paper gives evidence that initializing with pre-trained weights is always better compared to random initialization.
Upon Training for 60 Epochs my Training accuracy is at 96% and my validation accuracy is at 84% ,Over-fit! (severe maybe?). But what is more worrying is that my loss did not converge at all. Upon testing the network it failed miserably! like, it didn't even detect.
Then I took a slightly different approach. I did a two step training. First I trained the Inception-v3 on my dataset like a classification problem (Still initialized it with Image-net weights) it converged well. Then I used those weights to initialize the Faster-RCNN network. This worked! But, I am confused why this two staged approach works but Training from scratch didn't work. Given I initialized both the methods with the pre-trained image-net weights initially.
Is there a way to train Faster RCNN from scratch?

Related

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!

BERT + custom layer training performance going down with epochs

I'm training a classification model with custom layers on top of BERT. During this, the training performance of this model is going down with increasing epochs ( after the first epoch ) .. I'm not sure what to fix here - is it the model or the data?
( for the data it's binary labels, and balanced in the number of data points for each label).
Any quick pointers on what the problem could be? Has anyone come across this before?
Edit: Turns out there was a mismatch in the transformers library and tf version I was using. Once I fixed that, the training performance was fine!
Thanks!
Remember that fine-tuning a pre-trained model like Bert usually requires a much smaller number of epochs than models trained from scratch. In fact the authors of Bert recommend between 2 and 4 epochs. Further training often translates to overfitting to your data and forgetting the pre-trained weights (see catastrophic forgetting).
In my experience, this affects small datasets especially as it's easy to overfit on them, even at the 2nd epoch. Besides, you haven't commented on your custom layers on top of Bert, but adding much complexity there might increase overfitting also -- note that the common architecture for text classification only adds a linear transformation.

Why does the loss explode during training from scratch? - Tensorflow Object Detection Models

First of all I want to state out that I am familiar with the benefits of transfer learning. Moreover I am able to train a pretrained model from 'modelzoo' on my dataset. But for research purposes I want to train my model from scratch without transferlearning.
I want to adopt the Faster-RCNN Resnet 101 implementation from tensorsflow's Object Detection API to my dataset. If I use one of the pretrained models the training goes as expected and the loss is always in 'normal' ranges (never above about 6). But if I do not use transferlearning the loss jumps very frequently to extrem high values (about 80,000,000), but between those values the loss is in normal ranges. In addition to this I do not see any predictions of the network on images in TensorBoard. It seems like the network does not make any predictions at all. The only thing which I change is to comment out those two lines in the model.config file:
# fine_tune_checkpoint: 'path'
# from_detection_checkpoint: true
I tried a lot of things to find the reason: Changed optimizer, changed the learning rate, used gradient clipping, changed the initializer used different machines to train on but nothing helps. Moreover I inspected my label_map as well as my record file. To ensure that those files are correct I redid the steps mentioned above by using the pascal voc dataset, the script to create records and the label map from the api, but even with this code from the Object Detection API without any code changes, the loss explodes (Tensorflow Object Detection API own inputs).

TensorFlow model saving to be approached differently during training Vs. deployment?

Assume that I have a CNN which I am training on some dataset. The most important part of the model is the CNN architecture.
Now when I write a code, I define the model structure in a Python class. However, outside that class, I define a number of other nodes such as loss, accuracy, tf.Variable to keep count of epochs and so on.
When I am training, for properly resuming the training, I'd like to save all these nodes (e.g - loss, epoch variable etc), and not just the CNN structure.
However, once I am done with training, I would like to save only the CNN architecture and no nodes for loss, accuracy etc. This is because it will enable people using my model to exercise freedom in writing their own finetuning codes.
How to achieve this in TF code ? Can someone show an example ?
Is this approach towards saving followed by others also ? I just want to know if my approach is right.

Training Resnet deep neural network from scratch

I need to gain some knowledge about deep neural networks.
For a 'ResNet' very deep neural network, we can use transfer learning to train a model.
But Resnet has been trained over the ImageNet dataset. So their pre-trained weights can be used to train the model with another dataset. (for an example training a model for lung cancer detection with CT lung images)
I feels that this approach will be not accurate as the pre-trained weights has been completely trained over other objects but not with medical data.
Instead of transfer learning, is it possible to train the resnet from scratch? (but the available number of images to train the resnet is around 1500) . Is it something possible to do with a normal computer.
Can someone please share your valuable ideas with me
is it possible to train the resnet from scratch?
Yes, it is possible, but the amount of time one needs to get to good accuracy greatly depends on the data. For instance, training original ResNet-50 on a NVIDIA M40 GPU took 14 days (10^18 single precision ops). The most expensive operation in CNN is the convolution in the early layers.
ImageNet contains 14m 226x226x3 images. Since your dataset is ~10000x smaller, each epoch will take ~10000x less ops. On top of that, if you pass gray-scale instead of RGB images, the first convolution will take 3x less ops. Likewise spatial image size affects the training time as well. Training on smaller images can also increase the batch size, which usually speeds things up due to vectorization.
All in all, I estimate that a machine with a single consumer GPU, such as 1080 or 1080ti, can train ~100 epochs of ResNet-50 model in a day. Obviously, training on a 2-GPU machine would be even faster. If that is what you mean by a normal computer, the answer is yes.
But since your dataset is very small, there's a big chance of overfitting. This looks like the biggest issue that your approach faces.