Convergence in Logistic Regression in distributed tensorflow - tensorflow

I'm trying to develop logistic regression in distributed tensorflow and I want to integrate a convergence check in my algorithm apart from the upper bound of iterations. The convergence criteria I am about to use is
||prevW - currW|| < E
where prevW is the previous values of the model weights and currW the current ones. E is the convergence tolerance.
My question is about the previous model weights. Since I am using between graph replication and asynchronous training, I don't know when it's worker of the cluster will update the weights. So let's say a worker has computed the new weights using a batch and wants to check if the algorithm has converged in order to stop. I will use the weights available in local replica (so use the corresponding tensor) or I will evaluate the tensor to get the last updated value before I continue with the current computation? I tried to do as described above, but the algorithm did not converge and stopped after the upper bound for the iterations was reached.
Thank you beforehand for your help :D

I would do the convergence check in the same device where the variables are. This way you avoid copying too much stuff over the network. This can be done by putting it in a with tf.device(variable.device): block.

Related

Is there a way to retrieve the weights from a GPflow GPR model?

Is there a way to retrieve the weights from a GPflow GPR model?
I do not necessarily need the explicit weights. However, I have two issues that may be solved using the weights:
I would like to compile and send a trained model to a third party. I
would like to do this without sending the training data and without
the third party having access to the training data.
I would like to be able to predict new mean values without
calculating new variances. Currently predict_f calculates both the
mean and the variance, but I only use the mean. I believe I could
speed up my prediction significantly if I didn't calculate the
variance.
I could resolve both of these issues if I could retrieve the weights from the GPR model after training. However, if it is possible to resolve these tasks without ever dealing with explicit weights, that would be even better.
It's not entirely clear what you mean by "explicit weights", but if you mean alpha = Kxx^{-1} y where Kxx is the evaluation of k(x,x') and y is the vector of observation targets, then you can get that by using the Posterior object (see https://github.com/GPflow/GPflow/blob/develop/gpflow/posteriors.py), which you get by calling posterior = model.posterior(). You can then access posterior.alpha.
Re 1.: However, for predictions you still need to be able to compute Kzx the covariance between new test points and the training points, so you will also need to provide the training locations and kernel hyperparameters.
This also means that you cannot rely on this to keep your training data secret, as the third party could simply compute Kxx instead of Kzx and then get back y = Kxx # alpha. You can avoid sharing exact (x,y) training set pairs by using a sparse approximation (this would remove "individual identifiability" at least). But I still wouldn't rely on it for privacy.
Re 2.: The Posterior object already provides much faster predictions; if you only ask for full_cov=False (marginal variances, the default), then you're at worst about a factor ~3 or so slower than predicting just the mean (in practice, I would guesstimate less than 1.5x as slow). As of GPflow 2.3.0, there is no implementation within GPflow of predicting the mean only.

Avoiding overfitting while training a neural network with Tensorflow

I am training a neural network using Tensorflow's object detetction API to detect cars. I used the following youtube video to learn and execute the process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srPndLNMMpk&t=65s
Part 1 to 6 of his series.
Now in his video, he has mentioned to stop the training when the loss value reaches ~1 or below on an average and that it would take about 10000'ish' steps.
In my case, it is 7500 steps right now and the loss values keep fluctuating from 0.6 to 1.3.
Alot of people complained in the comment section about false positives on this series but I think this happened because of the unnecessary prolonged process of training (because they din't know maybe when to stop ?) which caused overfitting!
I would like to avoid this problem. I would like to have not the most optimum weights but fairly optimum weights while avoiding false detection or overfitting. I am also observing 'Total Loss' section of Tensorboard. It fluctuates between 0.8 to 1.2. When do I stop the training process?
I would also like to know in general, which factors does the 'stopping of training' depend on? is it always about the average loss of 1 or less?
Additional information:
My training data has ~300 images
Test data ~ 20 images
Since I am using the concept of transfer learning, I chose ssd_mobilenet_v1.model.
Tensorflow version 1.9 (on CPU)
Python version 3.6
Thank you!
You should use a validation test, different from the training set and the test set.
At each epoch, you compute the loss of both training and validation set.
If the validation loss begin to increase, stop your training. You can now test your model on your test set.
The Validation set size is usually the same as the test one. For example, training set is 70% and both validation and test set are 15% each.
Also, please note that 300 images in your dataset seems not enough. You should increase it.
For your other question :
The loss is the sum of your errors, and thus, depends on the problem, and your data. A loss of 1 does not mean much in this regard. Never rely on it to stop your training.

Does batch normalization work on balanced dataset?

I trained a classification network using tensorFlow with batch normalization in every convolutional layer. When I predict on a balanced test set where every category included in it, the accuracy is normal. However, if I chose any one specific category from test set, the accuracy is low, even zero.
But when 3 categories included in test set, the accuracy became higher. As we all know, the weights was fixed when the model finished training. But I find the balance in test set have greatly influence on prediction accuracy.
I think if batch normalization has influence on this, so I remove all batch normalization and retrained the model again. This time, when I predict only one category picture, it became normal.
Could anyone know why? THANKS!
You're right. If your training set is unbalanced you compute and accumulate mean values (for every layer) that are skewed in favor of the majority class.
In fact, you're not "normalizing" but instead, you're making the unbalancing problem worse.
Use batch normalization when you have a balanced training set and you can be sure that your batches will contain a balanced number of samples. This gives you optimal results.
However, since you added in the comments that you're using tf.contrib.layers.conv2d(x, num_output, kernel_size, stride, padding, activation_fn, normal_fn=tf.contrib.layers.batch_norm)
I spotted the problem: normalizer_fn calls the function you pass (batch_norm). But it uses the defaults parameters. By default, is_training equals to True thus you're computing even during the test phase the mean and the variance over the batch. Just read carefully the documentation of tf.contrib.layers.conv2d and use normalizer_params to pass is_training=True when training and is_training=False when testing/validating.

pruning tensorflow connections and weights (using cifar10 cnn)

I'm using tensorflow to run a cnn for image classification.
I use tensorflow cifar10 cnn implementation.(tensorflow cifar10)
I want to decrease the number of connections, meaning I want to prune the low-weight connections.
How can I create a new graph(subgraph) without some of the nuerones?
Tensorflow does not allow you lock/freeze a particular kernel of a particular layer, that I have found. The only I've found to do this is to use the tf.assign() function as shown in
How to freeze/lock weights of one Tensorflow variable (e.g., one CNN kernel of one layer
It's fairly cave-man but I've seen no other solution that works. Essentially, you have to .assign() the values every so often as you iterate through the data. Since this approach is so inelegant and brute-force, it's very slow. I do the .assign() every 100 batches.
Someone please post a better solution and soon!
The cifar10 model you point to, and for that matter, most models written in TensorFlow, do not model the weights (and hence, connections) of individual neurons directly in the computation graph. For instance, for fully connected layers, all the connections between the two layers, say, with M neurons in the layer below, and 'N' neurons in the layer above, are modeled by one MxN weight matrix. If you wanted to completely remove a neuron and all of its outgoing connections from the layer below, you can simply slice out a (M-1)xN matrix by removing the relevant row, and multiply it with the corresponding M-1 activations of the neurons.
Another way is add an addition mask to control the connections.
The first step involves adding mask and threshold variables to the
layers that need to undergo pruning. The variable mask is the same
shape as the layer's weight tensor and determines which of the weights
participate in the forward execution of the graph.
There is a pruning implementation under tensorflow/contrib/model_pruning to prune the model. Hope this can help you to prune model quickly.
https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tree/master/tensorflow/contrib/model_pruning
I think google has an updated answer here : https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tree/master/tensorflow/contrib/model_pruning
Removing pruning nodes from the trained graph:
$ bazel build -c opt contrib/model_pruning:strip_pruning_vars
$ bazel-bin/contrib/model_pruning/strip_pruning_vars --checkpoint_path=/tmp/cifar10_train --output_node_names=softmax_linear/softmax_linear_2 --filename=cifar_pruned.pb
I suppose that cifar_pruned.pb will be smaller, since the pruned "or zero masked" variables are removed.

Strange behavior of loss function in an implementation of TensorFlow matrix factorization model for recommendation system

Current implementation of recommendation system use TF 1.8 and WALS algorithm. The model was trained using self.fit(input_fn=input_fn) and ML Engine with run time version 1.8. Data set was formed following example using tensorflow.train.Example(...) Extraction from training logs shown below.
The fit was performed with some default parameters. The loss value did decreased on second evaluation. However loss did not changed after that. The final Root weighted squared error (rwse) in this training became 0.126.
Hyperparameter tuning was performed later and the best parameter set was used in the following training. The result of that training is shown below.
Tree things to note here. First, the loss value at the beginning is lower than at later evaluation steps. Low value in the beginning most likely due to choice of parameters from the results of hyperparameter tuning. Increase of the loss value later on looks strange. Second, it’s unchanged loss value after second evaluation. This pattern remains the same while self.fit(input_fn=input_fn) is used for model training. Third, the final rwse in this training became 0.487 while during hyperparameter tuning with the same parameter set rwse=0.015.
The question is if anyone observed something similar? Is it possible to improve performance of the algorithm using WALSMatrixFactorization class and self.fit(input_fn=input_fn, steps=train_steps)?? Thanks in advance for your help.