FastAI lrfind() method doesn’t work properly - machine-learning

Update 1
I updated my lr according to " you want to be 10x back from that point, regardless of slope." and set it to
max_lr=-slice(1e-3, 1e-2)
And here is what I got
And the plots
What does this mean?
As you can see in the 2nd graph that
the loss was very good starting from 1e-08, but I never set my lr to 1e-08, why do I see this??
the loss went up and down between 1e-07 and 1e-04 and eventually it soared to almost 0.05 when the lr came back around 4e-05. What does this mean? Overfitting? How come initially when the Learning Rate was around the same value(4e-05) the loss looked okay?
from the Batches processed/Loss, I can see that train_loss and valid_loss went together and looked really well. This means the model was trained very well? If it was well trained, why the shot-up at the end of graph 2?
I have followed the rule about picking up the correct lr, why does not it work? May I conclude that the lr_find() does not work properly?
Here is my lr_find() plot
then according to its graph, I picked up the steepest slope section: 1e-2 to 1e-1 as my lr.
Here is the code:
learn.fit_one_cycle(20, max_lr=slice(1e-2,1e-1))
But here is what I got during training
And here are the plots for learn.recoder
learn.recorder.plot_lr()
learn.recorder.plot()
learn.recorder.plot_losses()
As you can see the valid_loss is getting worse cyclically. So my conclusion is lr_find() method doesn’t work properly.
How can I verify it?
If you want to see the entire code, here it is; the only difference is I use to_fp16():
learn = cnn_learner(data, models.resnet50, metrics=error_rate).to_fp16()
https://forums.fast.ai/t/train-loss-and-valid-loss-look-very-good-but-predicting-really-bad/60925

Related

Neural network function converges to y=1

I'm trying to program a neural network with backpropagation in python.
Usually converges to 1. To the left of the image there are some delta values. They are very small, should they be larger? Do you know a reason why this converging could happen?
sometimes it goes up in the direction of the point and then goes down again
here is the complete code:
http://pastebin.com/9BiwhWrD the backpropagation code starts at line 146
(the root stuff in line 165 does nothing. was just trying out some ideas)
Any ideas of what could be wrong? Have you ever seen a behaviour like this?
Thanks you very much.
The reason why this happened is, because the input data was too large. The activation sigmoid function converged to f(x)=1 for x -> inf. I had to normalize the data
e.g.:
a = np.array([1,2,3,4,5])
a /= a.max()
or prevent generating unnormalized data at all.
Also, the interims value was updated BEFORE the sigmoid was applied. But the derivation of sigmoid looks like this: y'(x) = y(x)-(1-y(x)). In my case it was just: y'(x) = x-(1-x)
There were also errors in how i updated the weights after calculating the deltas. I rewrote the whole loop using a tutorial for neural networks with python and then it worked.
It still does not support bias but it can do classification. For regression it's not precise enough, but i guess this has to do with the missing bias.
Here is the code:
http://pastebin.com/hRCKe1dK
Someone suggested that i should put my training-data into a neural-network framework and see if it works. It didn't. So it was kindof clear that it had to to with it and so i had to the idea that it should be between -1 and 1.

Neural Turing Machine Loss Going to NaN

Update: This question is outdated and was asked for a pre 1.0 version of tensorflow. Do not refer to answers or suggest new ones.
I'm using the tf.nn.sigmoid_cross_entropy_with_logits function for the loss and it's going to NaN.
I'm already using gradient clipping, one place where tensor division is performed, I've added an epsilon to prevent division by zero, and the arguments to all softmax functions have an epsilon added to them as well.
Yet, I'm getting NaN's mid-way through training.
Are there any known issues where TensorFlow does this that I have missed?
It's quite frustrating because the loss is randomly going to NaN during training and ruining everything.
Also, how could I go about detecting if the training step will result in NaN and maybe skip that example altogether? Any suggestions?
EDIT: The network is a Neural Turing Machine.
EDIT 2: Here's the code for gradient clipping:
optimizer = tf.train.AdamOptimizer(self.lr)
gvs = optimizer.compute_gradients(loss)
capped_gvs =\
[(tf.clip_by_value(grad, -1.0, 1.0), var) if grad != None else (grad, var) for grad, var in gvs]
train_step = optimizer.apply_gradients(capped_gvs)
I had to add the if grad != None condition because I was getting an error without it. Could the problem be here?
Potential Solution: I'm using tf.contrib.losses.sigmoid_cross_entropy for a while now, and so far the loss hasn't diverged. I will test some more and report back.
Use 1e-4 for the learning rate. That one always seems to work for me with the Adam optimizer. Even if you gradient clip it can still diverge. Also another sneaky one is taking a square root since although it will be stable for all positive inputs its gradient diverges as the value approaches zero. Finally I would check and make sure all inputs to the model are reasonable.
I know it has been a while since this was asked, but I'd like to add another solution that helped me, on top of clipping. I found that, if I increase the batch size, the loss tends to not go close to 0, and doesn't end up (as of yet) going to NaN. Hope this helps anyone that finds this!
In my case, the NaN values were a result of NaN in the training datasets , while I was working on multiclass classifier , the problem was a dataframe positional filter on the [ one hot encoding ] labels.
Resolving the the target dataset resolved my issue - hope this help someone else.
Best of luck.
for me i added epsilon to parameters inside a log function.
i no longer see the errors but i noticed a moderate increase in the model training accuracy.

How to check if gradient descent with multiple variables converged correctly?

In linear regression with 1 variable I can clearly see on plot prediction line and I can see if it properly fits the training data. I just create a plot with 1 variable and output and construct prediction line based on found values of Theta 0 and Theta 1. So, it looks like this:
But how can I check validity of gradient descent results implemented on multiple variables/features. For example, if number of features is 4 or 5. How to check if it works correctly and found values of all thetas are valid? Do I have to rely only on cost function plotted against number of iterations carried out?
Gradient descent converges to a local minimum, meaning that the first derivative should be zero and the second non-positive. Checking these two matrices will tell you if the algorithm has converged.
We can think of gradient descent as of something solving a problem of f'(x) = 0 where f' denotes gradient of f. For checking this problem convergence, as far as I know, the standard approach is to calculate discrepancy on each iteration and see if it converges to 0.
That is, check if ||f'(x)|| (or its square) converges to 0.
There are some things you can try.
1) Check if your cost/energy function is not improving as your iteration progresses. Use something like "abs(E_after - E_before) < 0.00001*E_before", i.e. check if the relative difference is very low.
2) Check if your variables have stopped changing. You can opt a very similar strategy like above to check this.
There is actually no perfect way to fully make sure that your function has converged, but some of the things mentioned above are what usually people try.
Good luck!

Backpropogation neural network - error not converging

I am using backpropogation algorithm for my model. It works perfectly fine a simple xor case and when I tested it for a smaller subset of my actual data.
There are 3 inputs in total and a single output(0,1,2)
I have split the data set into training set (80% amounting to approx 5.5k) and the rest 20% as validation data.
I use trainingRate and momentum for calculating the delta weights.
I have normalized the input as below
from sklearn import preprocessing
min_max_scaler = preprocessing.MinMaxScaler()
X_train_minmax = min_max_scaler.fit_transform(input_array)
I use 1 hidden layer with sigmoid and linear activation functions for input-hidden and hidden-output respectively.
I train with trainingRate = 0.0005, momentum = 0.6, Epochs = 100,000. Any higher trainingRate shoots up the error to Nan. momentum values between 0.5 and 0.9 works fine and any other value makes the error Nan.
I tried various number of nodes in the hidden layer such as 3,6,9,10 and the error converged to 4140.327574 in each case. I am not sure how to reduce this. Changing the activation functions doesn't help. I even tried adding another hidden layer with gaussian activation function but I cannot reduce the error whatsoever.
Is it because of the outliers? Do i need to clean those values from the training data?
Any suggestion would be of great help be it the activation function, hidden layers, etc. I had been trying to get this working for quite some time and I am sort of stuck now.
Well I'm having kind of a similar problem, still haven fixed it, but I can tell you a couple of things I have found. I think the net is overfitting, my error at some point goes down and then starts going up again, also the verification set... is this you case also?
Check if you are implementing well the "early stopping" algorithm, most of the times the problem is not the backpropagation, but the error analysis or the validation analysis.
Hope this helps!

Neural Network Diverging instead of converging

I have implemented a neural network (using CUDA) with 2 layers. (2 Neurons per layer).
I'm trying to make it learn 2 simple quadratic polynomial functions using backpropagation.
But instead of converging, the it is diverging (the output is becoming infinity)
Here are some more details about what I've tried:
I had set the initial weights to 0, but since it was diverging I have randomized the initial weights
I read that a neural network might diverge if the learning rate is too high so I reduced the learning rate to 0.000001
The two functions I am trying to get it to add are: 3 * i + 7 * j+9 and j*j + i*i + 24 (I am giving the layer i and j as input)
I had implemented it as a single layer previously and that could approximate the polynomial functions better
I am thinking of implementing momentum in this network but I'm not sure it would help it learn
I am using a linear (as in no) activation function
There is oscillation in the beginning but the output starts diverging the moment any of weights become greater than 1
I have checked and rechecked my code but there doesn't seem to be any kind of issue with it.
So here's my question: what is going wrong here?
Any pointer will be appreciated.
If the problem you are trying to solve is of classification type, try 3 layer network (3 is enough accordingly to Kolmogorov) Connections from inputs A and B to hidden node C (C = A*wa + B*wb) represent a line in AB space. That line divides correct and incorrect half-spaces. The connections from hidden layer to ouput, put hidden layer values in correlation with each other giving you the desired output.
Depending on your data, error function may look like a hair comb, so implementing momentum should help. Keeping learning rate at 1 proved optimum for me.
Your training sessions will get stuck in local minima every once in a while, so network training will consist of a few subsequent sessions. If session exceeds max iterations or amplitude is too high, or error is obviously high - the session has failed, start another.
At the beginning of each, reinitialize your weights with random (-0.5 - +0.5) values.
It really helps to chart your error descent. You will get that "Aha!" factor.
The most common reason for a neural network code to diverge is that the coder has forgotten to put the negative sign in the change in weight expression.
another reason could be that there is a problem with the error expression used for calculating the gradients.
if these don't hold, then we need to see the code and answer.

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