Training on VOC from Scratch

[mcever]

Hi,

I am attempting to train this network on VOC from scratch, essentially trying to recreate the pre-trained weights available for download; however, after 70+ epochs, my model is still just predicting background for an mIOU of 3.49%. Here is the command I am running to train:

python issegm/voc.py --gpus 1,2,3 --split train --data-root data/VOCdevkit/ --output train_out/ --model voc_rna-a1_cls21 --batch-images 12 --crop-size
500 --origin-size 2048 --scale-rate-range 0.7,1.3 --lr-type fixed --base-lr 0.0016 --to-epoch 140 --kvstore local --prefetch-threads 4 --prefetcher thread --backward-do-mirror

Inside data/VOCdevkit/VOC2012 I have the original download of JPEGImages and SegmentationClass, which provides the full color segmentation images. Any help would be much appreciated.

Here's a snippet of output that may or may not help, showing fcn_valid moving a lot. I'm not entirely sure what the output means, so any explanation on what it is could be useful.

2019-04-11 15:00:09,073 Host Epoch[78] Batch [66-67] Speed: 11.93 samples/sec fcn_valid=0.623302
2019-04-11 15:00:10,056 Host Labels: 0 0.6 -1.0
2019-04-11 15:00:10,058 Host Labels: 0 0.6 -1.0
Waited for 2.59876251221e-05 seconds
2019-04-11 15:00:10,075 Host Epoch[78] Batch [67-68] Speed: 11.98 samples/sec fcn_valid=0.644102
2019-04-11 15:00:10,076 Host Labels: 0 0.6 -1.0
2019-04-11 15:00:11,055 Host Labels: 0 0.6 -1.0
2019-04-11 15:00:11,056 Host Labels: 0 0.6 -1.0
Waited for 3.50475311279e-05 seconds
2019-04-11 15:00:11,074 Host Labels: 0 0.6 -1.0
2019-04-11 15:00:11,077 Host Epoch[78] Batch [68-69] Speed: 11.98 samples/sec fcn_valid=0.632405
2019-04-11 15:00:12,056 Host Labels: 0 0.6 -1.0
2019-04-11 15:00:12,058 Host Labels: 0 0.6 -1.0
Waited for 2.50339508057e-05 seconds
2019-04-11 15:00:12,074 Host Labels: 0 0.6 -1.0
2019-04-11 15:00:12,077 Host Epoch[78] Batch [69-70] Speed: 12.00 samples/sec fcn_valid=0.775874
2019-04-11 15:00:13,057 Host Labels: 0 0.6 -1.0
2019-04-11 15:00:13,058 Host Labels: 0 0.6 -1.0
Waited for 2.59876251221e-05 seconds
2019-04-11 15:00:13,074 Host Labels: 0 0.6 -1.0
2019-04-11 15:00:13,077 Host Epoch[78] Batch [70-71] Speed: 12.01 samples/sec fcn_valid=0.562744
2019-04-11 15:00:14,056 Host Labels: 0 0.6 -1.0
2019-04-11 15:00:14,058 Host Labels: 0 0.6 -1.0
Waited for 0.000184059143066 seconds
2019-04-11 15:00:14,074 Host Labels: 0 0.6 -1.0
2019-04-11 15:00:14,075 Host Epoch[78] Batch [71-72] Speed: 12.03 samples/sec fcn_valid=0.552027

[mcever]

After much debugging, I found that part of my issue was apparently that I was training without initializing the weights, so my predictions quickly converged to a bunch of NaN's. I decided to retrain, initializing with the ImageNet weights like so

Host start with arguments Namespace(backward_do_mirror=True, base_lr=0.0016, batch_images=12, cache_images=None, check_start=1, check_step=4, crop_size=500, data_root='data/VOCdevkit/', dataset=None, debug=False, from_epoch=0, gpus='1,2,3', kvstore='local', log_file='voc_rna-a1_cls21.log', lr_steps=None, lr_type='fixed', model='voc_rna-a1_cls21', origin_size=2048, output='train+_out/', phase='train', prefetch_threads=4, prefetcher='thread', save_predictions=False, save_results=True, scale_rate_range='0.7,1.3', split='train+', stop_epoch=None, test_flipping=False, test_scales=None, test_steps=1, to_epoch=500, weight_decay=0.0005, weights='models/ilsvrc-cls_rna-a_cls1000_ep-0001.params')

Meanwhile, I ran validation on the validation and train+ sets every 5 epochs to track training progress. Performance on the validation set began to stabilize around 250 epochs around 45 mIOU, so I began then reducing the learning rate like so

2019-04-19 16:52:48,408 Host start with arguments Namespace(backward_do_mirror=True, base_lr=0.0016, batch_images=12, cache_images=None, check_start=1, check_step=4, crop_size=500, data_root='data/VOCdevkit/', dataset=None, debug=False, from_epoch=240, gpus='1,2,3', kvstore='local', log_file='voc_rna-a1_cls21.log', lr_steps=None, lr_type='linear', model='voc_rna-a1_cls21', origin_size=2048, output='train+_outp2/', phase='train', prefetch_threads=4, prefetcher='thread', save_predictions=False, save_results=True, scale_rate_range='0.7,1.3', split='train+', stop_epoch=None, test_flipping=False, test_scales=None, test_steps=1, to_epoch=500, weight_decay=0.0005, weights='train+_out/voc_rna-a1_cls21_ep-0240.params')

Now, after a total of about 410 epochs (started reducing learning rate from 240), I am still only achieving a max of 54.77 mIOU on the validation set. This is very much lower than the results presented in the paper. Any advice on how to improve would be greatly appreciated.

[rulixiang]

Hi, @mcever , I'm also trying to reproduce the results on VOC 2012 dataset. Have you reproduced the results as paper reported? If you have did it, can you share your training command?