pos_weight should be a vector instead of a scalar

[seermer]

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• I have searched the YOLOv5 issues and found no similar bug report.

YOLOv5 Component

Training

Bug

In the current implementation, pos_weight is set to a scalar (default 1.0).
However, according to the PyTorch official documentation, quote:

pos_weight (Tensor, optional) – a weight of positive examples. Must be a vector with a length equal to the number of classes.
also a given example:

For example, if a dataset contains 100 positive and 300 negative examples of a single class, then pos_weight for the class should be equal to 300/100=3. The loss would act as if the dataset contains 3 x 100=300 positive examples.

therefore, pos_weight should be basically class weight for classification loss.

Environment

• YOLOv5 6.1

Minimal Reproducible Example

current implementation passes only a single element vector (a scalar) no matter how many classes it has;
BCEcls = nn.BCEWithLogitsLoss(pos_weight=torch.tensor([h['cls_pw']], device=device))

Additional

related issue: #5604
in the above issue, pos_weight is misinterpreted as a scalar that is different from the class weight

possible fix:

1. change default hyp yaml to be a list instead of a scalar (I personally don't like this because if there are too many classes, this list will be super long)
2. change default cls loss pos_weight to torch.ones([nc]) * hyp['cls_pw'] (this sets all class to a same class weight, and hyp['cls_pw'] can stay as a scalar)
3. change default cls loss pos_weight to model.class_weights * hyp['cls_pw'] (I personally prefer this since class_weights are computed already, we can use it easily, and the hyp['cls_pw'] will stay as a scalar that scales all the class weights ) edit: I actually just realized that the computed model.class_weights is a different thing from the PyTorch doc, so if we want to match what is suggested in PyTorch doc, we might need to compute a new class weight, for example, we can define it as (total samples / nc) / samples per class * hyp['cls_pw']. In this way, all classes will be trained as if there are (total samples / nc) samples and scaled by hyp['cls_pw'].

edit: please let me know if I misunderstood anything. Thanks.

Are you willing to submit a PR?

• Yes I'd like to help by submitting a PR!

[github-actions]

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[glenn-jocher]

@seermer thanks for the feedback! Yes #3 is the best solution I think, or perhaps #3 multiplied by the hyp pw scalar?

[seermer]

@seermer thanks for the feedback! Yes #3 is the best solution I think, or perhaps #3 multiplied by the hyp pw scalar?

yes I think so, 3 probably is the best, but 3 probably doesn't work well with the --img-weights argument since it is changing the sampling frequency, so maybe we can do 2 when --img-weights is enabled, and use 3 otherwise

[glenn-jocher]

@seermer oh good point! Can you please submit a PR for this change? Would be interested to see what it does on COCO training.

[seermer]

I have just submitted a PR, its my first time doing a PR, hopefully, I'm doing things correctly

[glenn-jocher]

@seermer thank you! I will take a look when I have some time, extremely busy unfortunately.

[github-actions]

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