Training with RMSPROP gives different results - optimization

I'm training a neural network (a CNN on top of an RNN), using theano, and using RMSPROP for optimisation (I'm using lasagne implementation for that).
My problem is, every time I train the network, I get totally different results (accuracies). I'm initializing the parameters using a fixed seed and the problem doesn't happen when I train with SGD, so I guess RMSPROP is what causes the problem.
Is this a normal behaviour with RMSPROP? What is the best practice to deal with that? Should I train the network several times and take the best model?
I'm also optimising using one example per time (my training set is small so I'm not using mini-batches or batches) is this a good practice with RMSPROP?

Usually batch sizes around 40 gives better results, as for my experience training with 40 batch size for 3 epocs using default RMsprop gives around 89% accuracy. Have you tried adjusting the learning rate of RMsprop optimizer ? try with a very small value first ( default is 0.001, in keras implementation) and try to increment it with factors of 10 or 100.

Related

Validation loss and accuracy has a lot of 'jumps'

Hello everyone so I made this cnn model.
My data:
Train folder->30 classes->800 images each->24000 all together
Validation folder->30 classes->100 images each->3000 all together
Test folder->30 classes -> 100 images each -> 3000 all together
-I've applied data augmentation. ( on the train data)
-I got 5 conv layers with filters 32->64->128->128->128
each with maxpooling and batch normalization
-Added dropout 0.5 after flattening layers
Train part looks good. Validation part has a lot of 'jumps' though. Does it overfit?
Is there any way to fix this and make validation part more stable?
Note: I plann to increase epochs on my final model I'm just experimenting to see what works best since the model takes a lot of time in order to train. So for now I train with 20 epochs.
I've applied data augmentation (on the train data).
What does this mean? What kind of data did you add and how much? You might think I'm nitpicking, but if the distribution of the augmented data is different enough from the original data, then this will indeed cause your model to generalize poorly to the validation set.
Increasing your epochs isn't going to help here, your training loss is already decreasing reasonably. Training your model for longer is a good step if the validation loss is also decreasing nicely, but that's obviously not the case.
Some things I would personally try:
Try decreasing the learning rate.
Try training the model without the augmented data and see how the validation loss behaves.
Try splitting the augmented data so that it's also contained in the validation set and see how the model behaves.
Train part looks good. Validation part has a lot of 'jumps' though. Does it overfit?
the answer is yes. The so-called 'jumps' in the validation part may indicate that the model is not generalizing well to the validation data and therefore your model might be overfitting.
Is there any way to fix this and make validation part more stable?
To fix this you can use the following:
Increasing the size of your training set
Regularization techniques
Early stopping
Reduce the complexity of your model
Use different hyperparameters like learning rate

YOLOv4 loss too high

I am using YOLOv4-tiny for a custom dataset of 26 classes that I collected from Open Images Dataset. The dataset is almost balanced(850 images per class but different number of bounding boxes). When I used YOLOv4-tiny to train on just 3 classes the loss was near 0.5, it was fairly accurate. But for 26 classes as soon as the loss goes below 2 the model starts to overfit. The prediction are also very inaccurate.
I have tried to change the parameters like the learning rate, the momentum and the size but whatever I do the models becomes worse then before. Using regular YOLOv4 model rather then YOLO-tiny does not help either. How can I bring the loss further down?
Have you tried training with mAP? You can take a subset of your training set and make it the validation set. This can be done in the same way you made your training and test set. Then, you can run darknet.exe detector train data/obj.data yolo-obj.cfg yolov4.conv.137 -map. This will keep track of the loss in your validation set. When the error in the validation say goes up, this is the time to stop training and prevent overfitting (this is called: early stopping).
You need to run the training for (classes*2000)iterations. However, for the best scores, you need to train your model for at least 6000 iterations (also known as max_batches). Also please remember if you are using a b&w image, change the channels=3 to channels=1. You can stop your training once the avg loss becomes something like this: 0.XXXX.
Here's my mAP graph for 6000 iterations that ran for 6.2 hours:
avg loss with 6000 max_batches.
Moreover, you can follow this FAQ documentation here by Stéphane Charette.

Small gap between train and test error, does that mean overfitting?

i am working on a dataset of 368609 samples and 34 features, i wanted to use a neural network to predict latency (real value) using keras, the model has 3 hidden layers, each layer has 1024 neurons, i have used drop_out (50 %) and l2 regularization (0.001) for each hidden layer. The problem is i am getting a test mean absolute error of 3.5505 ms and train mean absolute error of 3.4528. Here, the train error is smaller than test error by a small gap, does this mean that we have an overfitting problem here ?
Not really, yet it is still always a good idea to see how your model is generalizing to new data.
Keep something between 10%-20% of your original dataset as a test set and try to predict the output for each record in the test set.
Sometimes when we deal with the same validation set for many attempts of improving our model, we tend to overfit the evaluation dataset as well.
Having 3 different datasets for training, evaluation and testing usually provides a whole solution to overfitting.
If you get a high accuracy on your training set and a low accuracy on you test set it often means that your are overfitting. So in you case - no you are probably not overfitting.
Normally you would also have a validation set, so you don't fit your data to the testset.

Time taken to train Resnet on CIFAR-10

I was writing a neural net to train Resnet on CIFAR-10 dataset.
The paper Deep Residual Learning For Image Recognition mentions training for around 60,000 epochs.
I was wondering - what exactly does an epoch refer to in this case? Is it a single pass through a minibatch of size 128 (which would mean around 150 passes through the entire 50000 image training set?
Also how long is this expected to take to train(assume CPU only, 20-layer or 32-layer ResNet)? With the above definition of an epoch, it seems it would take a very long time...
I was expecting something around 2-3 hours only, which is equivalent to about 10 passes through the 50000 image training set.
The paper never mentions 60000 epochs. An epoch is generally taken to mean one pass over the full dataset. 60000 epochs would be insane. They use 64000 iterations on CIFAR-10. An iteration involves processing one minibatch, computing and then applying gradients.
You are correct in that this means >150 passes over the dataset (these are the epochs). Modern neural network models often take days or weeks to train. ResNets in particular are troublesome due to their massive size/depth. Note that in the paper they mention training the model on two GPUs which will be much faster than on the CPU.
If you are just training some models "for fun" I would recommend scaling them down significantly. Try 8 layers or so; even this might be too much. If you are doing this for research/production use, get some GPUs.

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.