How to look at the parameters of a pytorch model? - machine-learning

I have a simple pytorch neural net that I copied from openai, and I modified it to some extent (mostly the input).
When I run my code, the output of the network remains the same on every episode, as if no training occurs.
I want to see if any training happens, or if some other reason causes the results to be the same.
How can I make sure any movement happens to the weights?
Thanks

Depends on what you are doing, but the easiest would be to check the weights of your model.
You can do this (and compare with the ones from previous iteration) using the following code:
for parameter in model.parameters():
print(parameter.data)
If the weights are changing, the neural network is being optimized (which doesn't necessarily mean it learns anything useful in particular).

Related

How to stack neural network and xgboost model?

I have trained a neural network and an XGBoost model for the same problem, now I am confused that how should I stack them. Should I just pass the output of the neural network as a parameter to the XGBoost model, or should I take the weighting of their results seperately ? Which would be better ?
This question cannot be clearly answered. I would suggest to check both possibilities and chose the one, that worked best.
Using the output of one model as input to the other model
I guess, you know, what you have to do to use the output of the NN as input to XGBoost. You should just take some time, about how you handle the test and train data (see below). Use the "probabilities" rather than the binary labels for that. Of course, you could also try it vice-versa, so that the NN gets the output of the XGBoost model as an additional input.
Using a Votingclassifier
The other possibility is to use a VotingClassifier using soft-voting. You can use VotingClassifier(voting='soft') for that (to be precise sklearn.ensemble.VotingClassifier). You could also play around with the weights here.
Difference
The big difference is, that with the first possibility the XGBoost model might learn, in what areas the NN is weak and in which it is strong, while with the VotingClassifier the outputs of both models are equally weighted for all samples and it relies on the assumption that the model output a "probability" not so close to 0 / 1 if they are not so confident about the prediciton of the specific input record. But this assumption might not be always true.
Handling of the Train/Testdata
In both cases, you need to think about, how you should handle the train/test data. The train/test data should ideally be split the same way for both models. Otherwise you might introduce some kind of data-leakage problem.
For the VotingClassifier this is no problem, because it can be used as a regular skearn model class. For the first method (output of model 1 is one feature of model 2), you should make sure, you do the train-test-split (or the cross-validation) with exactly the same records. If you don't do that, you would run the risk to validate the output of your second model on a record which was in the training set of model 1 (except for the additonal feature of course) and this clearly could cause a data-leakage problem which results in a score that appears to be better than how the model would actually perform on unseen productive data.

Regarding the consistency of convolutional neural networks

I am currently building a 2-channel (also called double-channel) convolutional neural network in order to classify 2 binary images (containing binary objects) as 'similar' or 'different'.
The problem I am having is that it seems as though the network doesn't always converge to the same solution. For example, I can use exactly the same ordering of training pairs and all the same parameters and so forth, and when I run the network multiple times, each time produces a different solution; sometimes converging to below 2% error rates, and other times I get 50% error rates.
I have a feeling that it has something to do with the random initialization of the weights of the network, which results in different optimization paths each time the network is executed. This issue even occurs when I use SGD with momentum, so I don't really know how to 'force' the network to converge to the same solution (global optima) every time?
Can this have something to do with the fact that I am using binary images instead of grey-scale or color images, or is there something intrinsic to neural networks that is causing this issue?
There are several sources of randomness in training.
Initialization is one. SGD itself is of course stochastic since the content of the minibatches is often random. Sometimes, layers like dropout are inherently random too. The only way to ensure getting identical results is to fix the random seed for all of them.
Given all these sources of randomness and a model with many millions of parameters, your quote
"I don't really know how to 'force' the network to converge to the same solution (global optima) every time?"
is something pretty much something anyone should say - no one knows how to find the same solution every time, or even a local optima, let alone the global optima.
Nevertheless, ideally, it is desirable to have the network perform similarly across training attempts (with fixed hyper-parameters and dataset). Anything else is going to cause problems in reproducibility, of course.
Unfortunately, I suspect the problem is inherent to CNNs.
You may be aware of the bias-variance tradeoff. For a powerful model like a CNN, the bias is likely to be low, but the variance very high. In other words, CNNs are sensitive to data noise, initialization, and hyper-parameters. Hence, it's not so surprising that training the same model multiple times yields very different results. (I also get this phenomenon, with performances changing between training runs by as much as 30% in one project I did.) My main suggestion to reduce this is stronger regularization.
Can this have something to do with the fact that I am using binary images instead of grey-scale or color images, or is there something intrinsic to neural networks that is causing this issue?
As I mentioned, this problem is present inherently for deep models to an extent. However, your use of binary images may also be a factor, since the space of the data itself is rather discontinuous. Perhaps consider "softening" the input (e.g. filtering the inputs) and using data augmentation. A similar approach is known to help in label smoothing, for example.

Reusing Inception V3 Conv Neural Net (tensorflow) with 0% accuracy

EDIT1: My code is the same as here, https://github.com/tensorflow/models/blob/master/inception/inception. The only difference is that I pack my files into TFRecords and feed it bactch wise. Also, the ratio of Class 0 : Class 1 is 70:30.
I'm currently working on a project in which I'm making use of inception-V3 CNN model to train a classifier. Currently, I am working on a binary classifier (either predict 1 or 0) but, my model only predicts class 0 for everything. While troubleshooting I've found that the probability of prediction is 100% for class 0 all the time. I have verified everything from the input queuing system to the eval and testing, everything seems to be working well too.
Strangely, the loss value reduces in a perfect semi-parabolic fashion which makes me think that the loss has converged to a local minima. Upon testing the script only churns out class 0(with 100% probability) each time. Another thing I've noticed is that the activation across various Conv layers are always constant which could imply that the neurons are just not firing at all.
My question is,
1. Is my model working ? The loss seems to converge but the activation across various layers seems to be stagnant.
2. I am using the training code available from the models section of the tensorflow (https://github.com/tensorflow/models/blob/master/inception/inception/inception_train.py)
I am reusing the train, eval and supporting code to train my model with a custom input pipeline created by me (which is also working). Can someone help guide me in the right direction on this?
Thanks.
Ik I am a little late in answering this question 😅
First of all your model didn't learn anything at all. All it did (cleverly 😂) was to predict class 0 for all cases so that it achieves a baseline accuracy of 70% without any effort. (Probably the model was lazy 😪😋) JK. This is a very well known problem in machine learning. This is called as class imbalance problem. Refer this http://machinelearningmastery.com/tactics-to-combat-imbalanced-classes-in-your-machine-learning-dataset/.
Apart from the techniques mentioned there. The one technique that works wonders is using class weights. That is, basically telling the network to be biased towards the weaker class. In your case class weights will be class0:class1 = 3:7. This is a hyperparameter too! But this is a good point to start.
Moreover, you didn't give any info about your dataset size. Whether you are fine tuning or training from scratch. Without them it's hard to speculate. By default I would suggest fine tuning.
Moreover, by loss you mean the training loss or validation loss? Because training loss has literally no info regarding the performance of the model. Moreover, in my opinion both training loss, and validation losses have very little info to derive meaningful insights about the model's performance. Use other metrics like confusion matrix,f1 score, recall, precision etc.
Finally, there is absolutely no single answer to your question. The only way is the hard way - you will learn along with the model 😉. Because I consider training a NN especially a CNN an art. In which, intuition plays a very crucial role coz, most of the times, the least expected changes would give the best results. Anyway that's the fun part of training a NN.
Happy training 💪
P.S: Try using the visualisation tools like gradcam to know whether the model is looking at the correct part of the image for classification. This is very important!

How does pre-training improve classification in neural networks?

Many of the papers I have read so far have this mentioned "pre-training network could improve computational efficiency in terms of back-propagating errors", and could be achieved using RBMs or Autoencoders.
If I have understood correctly, AutoEncoders work by learning the
identity function, and if it has hidden units less than the size of
input data, then it also does compression, BUT what does this even have
anything to do with improving computational efficiency in propagating
error signal backwards? Is it because the weights of the pre
trained hidden units does not diverge much from its initial values?
Assuming data scientists who are reading this would by theirselves
know already that AutoEncoders take inputs as target values since
they are learning identity function, which is regarded as
unsupervised learning, but can such method be applied to
Convolutional Neural Networks for which the first hidden layer is
feature map? Each feature map is created by convolving a learned
kernel with a receptive field in the image. This learned kernel, how
could this be obtained by pre-training (unsupervised fashion)?
One thing to note is that autoencoders try to learn the non-trivial identify function, not the identify function itself. Otherwise they wouldn't have been useful at all. Well the pre-training helps moving the weight vectors towards a good starting point on the error surface. Then the backpropagation algorithm, which is basically doing gradient descent, is used improve upon those weights. Note that gradient descent gets stuck in the closes local minima.
[Ignore the term Global Minima in the image posted and think of it as another, better, local minima]
Intuitively speaking, suppose you are looking for an optimal path to get from origin A to destination B. Having a map with no routes shown on it (the errors you obtain at the last layer of the neural network model) kind of tells you where to to go. But you may put yourself in a route which has a lot of obstacles, up hills and down hills. Then suppose someone tells you about a route a a direction he has gone through before (the pre-training) and hands you a new map (the pre=training phase's starting point).
This could be an intuitive reason on why starting with random weights and immediately start to optimize the model with backpropagation may not necessarily help you achieve the performance you obtain with a pre-trained model. However, note that many models achieving state-of-the-art results do not use pre-training necessarily and they may use the backpropagation in combination with other optimization methods (e.g. adagrad, RMSProp, Momentum and ...) to hopefully avoid getting stuck in a bad local minima.
Here's the source for the second image.
I don't know a lot about autoencoder theory, but I've done a bit of work with RBMs. What RBMs do is they predict what the probability is of seeing the specific type of data in order to get the weights initialized to the right ball park- it is considered an (unsupervised) probabilistic model, so you don't correct using the known labels. Basically, the idea here is that having a learning rate that is too big will never lead to convergence but having one that is too small will take forever to train. Thus, by "pretraining" in this way you find out the ball park of the weights and then can set the learning rate to be small in order to get them down to the optimal values.
As for the second question, no, you don't generally prelearn kernels, at least not in an unsupervised fashion. I suspect that what is meant by pretraining here is a bit different than in your first question- this is to say, that what is happening is that they are taking a pretrained model (say from model zoo) and fine tuning it with a new set of data.
Which model you use generally depends on the type of data you have and the task at hand. Convnets I've found to train faster and efficiently, but not all data has meaning when convolved, in which case dbns may be the way to go. Unless say, you have a small amount of data then I'd use something other than neural networks entirely.
Anyways, I hope this helps clear some of your questions.

Things to try when Neural Network not Converging

One of the most popular questions regarding Neural Networks seem to be:
Help!! My Neural Network is not converging!!
See here, here, here, here and here.
So after eliminating any error in implementation of the network, What are the most common things one should try??
I know that the things to try would vary widely depending on network architecture.
But tweaking which parameters (learning rate, momentum, initial weights, etc) and implementing what new features (windowed momentum?) were you able to overcome some similar problems while building your own neural net?
Please give answers which are language agnostic if possible. This question is intended to give some pointers to people stuck with neural nets which are not converging..
If you are using ReLU activations, you may have a "dying ReLU" problem. In short, under certain conditions, any neuron with a ReLU activation can be subject to a (bias) adjustment that leads to it never being activated ever again. It can be fixed with a "Leaky ReLU" activation, well explained in that article.
For example, I produced a simple MLP (3-layer) network with ReLU output which failed. I provided data it could not possibly fail on, and it still failed. I turned the learning rate way down, and it failed more slowly. It always converged to predicting each class with equal probability. It was all fixed by using a Leaky ReLU instead of standard ReLU.
If we are talking about classification tasks, then you should shuffle examples before training your net. I mean, don't feed your net with thousands examples of class #1, after thousands examples of class #2, etc... If you do that, your net most probably wouldn't converge, but would tend to predict last trained class.
I had faced this problem while implementing my own back prop neural network. I tried the following:
Implemented momentum (and kept the value at 0.5)
Kept the learning rate at 0.1
Charted the error, weights, input as well as output of each and every neuron, Seeing the data as a graph is more helpful in figuring out what is going wrong
Tried out different activation function (all sigmoid). But this did not help me much.
Initialized all weights to random values between -0.5 and 0.5 (My network's output was in the range -1 and 1)
I did not try this but Gradient Checking can be helpful as well
If the problem is only convergence (not the actual "well trained network", which is way to broad problem for SO) then the only thing that can be the problem once the code is ok is the training method parameters. If one use naive backpropagation, then these parameters are learning rate and momentum. Nothing else matters, as for any initialization, and any architecture, correctly implemented neural network should converge for a good choice of these two parameters (in fact, for momentum=0 it should converge to some solution too, for a small enough learning rate).
In particular - there is a good heuristic approach called "resillient backprop" which is in fact parameterless appraoch, which should (almost) always converge (assuming correct implementation).
after you've tried different meta parameters (optimization / architecture), the most probable place to look at is - THE DATA
as for myself - to minimize fiddling with meta parameters, i keep my optimizer automated - Adam is by opt-of-choice.
there are some rules of thumb regarding application vs architecture... but its really best to crunch those on your own.
to the point:
in my experience, after you've debugged the net (the easy debugging), and still don't converge or get to an undesired local minima, the usual suspect is the data.
weather you have contradictory samples or just incorrect ones (outliers), a small amount can make the difference from say 0.6-acc to (after cleaning) 0.9-acc..
a smaller but golden (clean) dataset is much better than a big slightly dirty one...
with augmentation you can tweak results even further.

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