CNN Loss stuck at 2.302 (ln(10)) - tensorflow

I am trying to model the Neural Net for solving CIFAR-10 dataset, but there is this very odd problem I am facing, I have tried over 6 different CNN architecture and with many different CNN hyperparameters and fully connected #neurons values, but all seem to fail with loss of 2.302 and corresponding accuracy of 0.0625, why does this happen, what property of CNN or neural net makes this, I also tried dropout, l2_norm, different kernel sizes, different padding in CNN and Max Pool. I don't understand why the loss gets stuck over such an odd number?
I am implementing this using tensorflow, and I have tried softmax layer + cross_entropy_loss, and without_softmax_layer + sparse_cross_entropy_loss. Is it the plateau the neural net loss function is stuck at?

This seems like you accidentally applied a non-linearity/activation function to the last layer of your network. Keep in mind that the cross entropy works upon values within a range between 0 and 1. As you "force" your output to this range automatically by applying the softmax function just before computing the cross entropy, you should just "apply" a linear activation function (just don't add any).
By the way, the value of 2.302 is not random by any chance. It is rather the result of the softmax loss being -ln(0.1) when you assume that all 10 classes (CIFAR-10) initially got the same expected diffuse probability of 0.1. Check out the explanation by Andrej Karpathy:
http://cs231n.github.io/neural-networks-3/

Related

Function CNN model written in Keras 2.2.4 not learning in TensorFlow or Keras 2.4

I am dealing with an object detection problem and using a model which is actually functioning (its results have been published on a paper and I have the original code). Originally, the code was written with Keras 2.2.4 without importing TensorFlow and trained and tested on the same dataset that I am using at the moment. However, when I try to run the same model with TensorFlow 2.x it just won't learn a thing.
I have tried importing everything from TensorFlow 2.4, but I have the same problem if I import everything (layers, models, optimizers...) from Keras 2.4. And I have tried to do so on two different devices, both using a GPU. Namely, what is happening is that the loss function decreases ridiculously fast, but the accuracy won't increase a bit (or, if it does, it gets stuck around 10% or smth). Also, every now and then this happens from an epoch to the next one:
Loss undergoes HUGE jumps between consecutive epochs, and all this without any changes in accuracy
I have tried to train the network on another dataset (had to change the last layers in order to match the required dimensions) and the model seemed to be learning in a normal way, i.e. the accuracy actually increases and the loss doesn't reach 0.0x in one epoch.
I can't post the script, but the model is an Encoder-Decoder network: consecutive Convolutions with increasing number of filters reduce the dimensions of the image, and a specular path of Transposed Convolutions restores the original dimensions. So basically the network only contains:
Conv2D
Conv2DTranspose
BatchNormalization
Activation("relu")
Activation("sigmoid")
concatenate
6 is used to put together outputs from parallel paths or distant layers; 3 and 4 are used after every Conv or ConvTranspose; 5 is only used as final activation function, i.e. as output layer.
I think the problem is pretty generic and I am honestly surprised that I couldn't find a single question about it. What could be happening here? The problem must have something to do with TF/Keras versions, but I can't find any documentation about it and I have been trying to change so many things but nothing changes. It's crazy because if I didn't know that the model works I would try to rewrite it from scratch so I am afraid that this problem may occurr with a new network and I won't be able to understand whether it's the libraries or the model itself.
Thank you in advance! :)
EDIT
Code snippets:
Convolutional block:
encoder1 = Conv2D(filters=first_layer_channels, kernel_size=2, strides=2)(input)
encoder1 = BatchNormalization()(encoder1)
encoder1 = Activation('relu')(encoder1)
Decoder
decoder1 = Conv2DTranspose(filters=first_layer_channels, kernel_size=2, strides=2)(encoder4)
decoder1 = BatchNormalization()(decoder1)
decoder1 = Activation('relu')(decoder1)
Final layers:
final = Conv2D(filters=total, kernel_size=1)(decoder4)
final = BatchNormalization()(final)
Last_Conv = Activation('sigmoid')(final)
The task is human pose estimation: the network (which, I recall, works on this specific task with Keras 2.2.4) has to predict twenty binary maps containing the positions of specific keypoints.

diagnosis on training process of neural network

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.

Different between fit and evaluate in keras

I have used 100000 samples to train a general model in Keras and achieve good performance. Then, for a particular sample, I want to use the trained weights as initialization and continue to optimize the weights to further optimize the loss of the particular sample.
However, the problem occurred. First, I load the trained weight by the keras API easily, then, I evaluate the loss of the one particular sample, and the loss is close to the loss of the validation loss during the training of the model. I think it is normal. However, when I use the trained weight as the inital and further optimize the weight over the one sample by model.fit(), the loss is really strange. It is much higher than the evaluate result and gradually became normal after several epochs.
I think it is strange that, for the same one simple and loading the same model weight, why the model.fit() and model.evaluate() return different results. I used batch normalization layers in my model and I wonder that it may be the reason. The result of model.evaluate() seems normal, as it is close to what I seen in the validation set before.
So what cause the different between fit and evaluation? How can I solve it?
I think your core issue is that you are observing two different loss values during fit and evaluate. This has been extensively discussed here, here, here and here.
The fit() function loss includes contributions from:
Regularizers: L1/L2 regularization loss will be added during training, increasing the loss value
Batch norm variations: during batch norm, running mean and variance of the batch will be collected and then those statistics will be used to perform normalization irrespective of whether batch norm is set to trainable or not. See here for more discussion on that.
Multiple batches: Of course, the training loss will be averaged over multiple batches. So if you take average of first 100 batches and evaluate on the 100th batch only, the results will be different.
Whereas for evaluate, just do forward propagation and you get the loss value, nothing random here.
Bottomline is, you should not compare train and validation loss (or fit and evaluate loss). Those functions do different things. Look for other metrics to check if your model is training fine.

Tensorflow: loss decreasing, but accuracy stable

My team is training a CNN in Tensorflow for binary classification of damaged/acceptable parts. We created our code by modifying the cifar10 example code. In my prior experience with Neural Networks, I always trained until the loss was very close to 0 (well below 1). However, we are now evaluating our model with a validation set during training (on a separate GPU), and it seems like the precision stopped increasing after about 6.7k steps, while the loss is still dropping steadily after over 40k steps. Is this due to overfitting? Should we expect to see another spike in accuracy once the loss is very close to zero? The current max accuracy is not acceptable. Should we kill it and keep tuning? What do you recommend? Here is our modified code and graphs of the training process.
https://gist.github.com/justineyster/6226535a8ee3f567e759c2ff2ae3776b
Precision and Loss Images
A decrease in binary cross-entropy loss does not imply an increase in accuracy. Consider label 1, predictions 0.2, 0.4 and 0.6 at timesteps 1, 2, 3 and classification threshold 0.5. timesteps 1 and 2 will produce a decrease in loss but no increase in accuracy.
Ensure that your model has enough capacity by overfitting the training data. If the model is overfitting the training data, avoid overfitting by using regularization techniques such as dropout, L1 and L2 regularization and data augmentation.
Last, confirm your validation data and training data come from the same distribution.
Here are my suggestions, one of the possible problems is that your network start to memorize data, yes you should increase regularization,
update:
Here I want to mention one more problem that may cause this:
The balance ratio in the validation set is much far away from what you have in the training set. I would recommend, at first step try to understand what is your test data (real-world data, the one your model will face in inference time) descriptive look like, what is its balance ratio, and other similar characteristics. Then try to build such a train/validation set almost with the same descriptive you achieve for real data.
Well, I faced the similar situation when I used Softmax function in the last layer instead of Sigmoid for binary classification.
My validation loss and training loss were decreasing but accuracy of both remained constant. So this gave me lesson why sigmoid is used for binary classification.

Deep learning Gradient at last but output layer is always zero

I have been working with udacity self driving challenge#2. What ever changes I make to the deep network like learning rate, activation function, i am getting gradient zero issue while training. I have used both cross entropy loss and mse loss. For cross entropy 100 classes are used with degree difference of 10 i.e radian angle of 0.17. For example from (-8.2 to -8.03) is class 0 and then (-8.03 to -7.86) is class 1 and so on.
Please find attached screen shots. As seen the layer before output (fc4 in the first image) almost becomes zero. So most of the gradient above almost follows the same pattern. Need some suggestion to eliminate this gradient zero error.
This seems to be vanishing gradient problem, 1.) Have you tried Relu? (I know you said you have tried diff activation fn) 2.) Have you tried reducing # of layers? 3.) Are your features normalized?
There are architectures designed to prevent this as well (ex. LSTM) but I think you should be able to get by with something simple like above.