I am trying to implement a model for binary classification problem. Up to now, I was using softmax function (at the output layer) together with torch.NLLLoss function to calculate the loss. However, now I want to use the sigmoid function (instead of softmax) at the output layer. If I do that, should I also change the loss function (to BCELoss or binary_cross_entropy) or may I still use torch.NLLLoss function ?
If you use sigmoid function, then you can only do binary classification. It's not possible to do a multi-class classification. The reason for this is because sigmoid function always returns a value in the range between 0 and 1. So, for instance one can threshold the value at 0.5 and separate (or classify) it into two classes based on the obtained values.
Regarding the objective function NLLLoss - Negative Log Likelihood Loss. It just learns the data distribution. So, it's not a problem as long as that what you're trying to achieve during training.
Related
I am going through a Binary Classification tutorial using PyTorch and here, the last layer of the network is torch.Linear() with just one neuron. (Makes Sense) which will give us a single neuron. as pred=network(input_batch)
After that the choice of Loss function is loss_fn=BCEWithLogitsLoss() (which is numerically stable than using the softmax first and then calculating loss) which will apply Softmax function to the output of last layer to give us a probability. so after that, it'll calculate the binary cross entropy to minimize the loss.
loss=loss_fn(pred,true)
My concern is that after all this, the author used torch.round(torch.sigmoid(pred))
Why would that be? I mean I know it'll get the prediction probabilities in the range [0,1] and then round of the values with default threshold of 0.5.
Isn't it better to use the sigmoid once after the last layer within the network rather using a softmax and a sigmoid at 2 different places given it's a binary classification??
Wouldn't it be better to just
out = self.linear(batch_tensor)
return self.sigmoid(out)
and then calculate the BCE loss and use the argmax() for checking accuracy??
I am just curious that can it be a valid strategy?
You seem to be thinking of the binary classification as a multi-class classification with two classes, but that is not quite correct when using the binary cross-entropy approach. Let's start by clarifying the goal of the binary classification before looking at any implementation details.
Technically, there are two classes, 0 and 1, but instead of considering them as two separate classes, you can see them as opposites of each other. For example, you want to classify whether a StackOverflow answer was helpful or not. The two classes would be "helpful" and "not helpful". Naturally, you would simply ask "Was the answer helpful?", the negative aspect is left off, and if that wasn't the case, you could deduce that it was "not helpful". (Remember, it's a binary case, there is no middle ground).
Therefore, your model only needs to predict a single class, but to avoid confusion with the actual two classes, that can be expressed as: The model predicts the probability that the positive case occurs. In context of the previous example: What is the probability that the StackOverflow answer was helpful?
Sigmoid gives you values in the range [0, 1], which are the probabilities. Now you need to decide when the model is confident enough for it to be positive by defining a threshold. To make it balanced, the threshold is 0.5, therefore as long as the probability is greater than 0.5 it is positive (class 1: "helpful") otherwise it's negative (class 0: "not helpful"), which is achieved by rounding (i.e. torch.round(torch.sigmoid(pred))).
After that the choice of Loss function is loss_fn=BCEWithLogitsLoss() (which is numerically stable than using the softmax first and then calculating loss) which will apply Softmax function to the output of last layer to give us a probability.
Isn't it better to use the sigmoid once after the last layer within the network rather using a softmax and a sigmoid at 2 different places given it's a binary classification??
BCEWithLogitsLoss applies Sigmoid not Softmax, there is no Softmax involved at all. From the nn.BCEWithLogitsLoss documentation:
This loss combines a Sigmoid layer and the BCELoss in one single class. This version is more numerically stable than using a plain Sigmoid followed by a BCELoss as, by combining the operations into one layer, we take advantage of the log-sum-exp trick for numerical stability.
By not applying Sigmoid in the model you get a more numerically stable version of the binary cross-entropy, but that means you have to apply the Sigmoid manually if you want to make an actual prediction outside of training.
[...] and use the argmax() for checking accuracy??
Again, you're thinking of the multi-class scenario. You only have a single output class, i.e. output has size [batch_size, 1]. Taking argmax of that, will always give you 0, because that is the only available class.
The DQN algorithm below
Source
At the gradient descent line, there's something I don't quite understand.
For example, if I have 8 actions, then the output Q is a vector of 8 components, right?
But for each record in D, the return y_i is only a scalar with respect to a given action. How can I perform gradient descent on (y_i - Q)^2 ? I think it's not guaranteed that within a minibatch I have all actions' returns for a state.
You need to calculate the loss only on the Q-value which its action is selected. In your example, assume for a given row in your mini-batch, the action is 3. Then, you obtain the corresponding target, y_3, and then the loss is (Q(s,3) - y_3)^2, and basically you set the loss value of other actions to zero. You can implement this by using gather_nd in tensorflow or by obtaining one-hot-encode version of actions and then multiplying that one-hot-encode vector to Q-value vector. Using a one-hot-encode vector you can write:
action_input = tf.placeholder("float",[None,action_len])
QValue_batch = tf.reduce_sum(tf.multiply(T_Q_value,action_input), reduction_indices = 1)
in which action_input = np.eye(nb_classes)[your_action (e.g. 3)]. Same procedure can be followed by gather_nd:
https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/gather_nd
I hope this resolves your confusion.
I am working on predicting Semantic Textual Similarity (SemEval 2017 Task-1) between a pair of texts. The similarity score (output) is a continuous value between [0,5]. The neural network model (link below), therefore, has 6 units in the final layer for prediction between values [0,5]. The objective function used is the Pearson correlation coefficient and softmax activation is used. Now, in order to train the model, how can I give the target output values to the model? Since there are 6 output classes, I should probably send one-hot-encoded vectors of the output. In that case, how can we convert the output (which might be a float value such as 2.33) to a one-hot vector of length 6? Or is there any other way of specifying the target output and training the model?
Paper: http://nlp.arizona.edu/SemEval-2017/pdf/SemEval016.pdf
If the value you're trying to predict is continuously-defined, you might be better off configuring this as a regression architecture. This will be simpler to train and interpret and will give you non-integer predictions (which you can then bucket or threshold however you please).
In order to do this, replace your softmax layer with a layer containing a single neuron with a linear activation function. Then you can simply train this network using your real-valued similarity numbers at the output. For loss function, you can use MSE / L2 unless you have a reason to do otherwise.
While defining prototxt in caffe, I found sometimes we use Softmax as the last layer type, sometimes we use SoftmaxWithLoss, I know the Softmax layer will return the probability the input data belongs to each class, but it seems that SoftmaxwithLoss will also return the class probability, then what's the difference between them? or did I misunderstand the usage of the two layer types?
While Softmax returns the probability of each target class given the model predictions, SoftmaxWithLoss not only applies the softmax operation to the predictions, but also computes the multinomial logistic loss, returned as output. This is fundamental for the training phase (without a loss there will be no gradient that can be used to update the network parameters).
See
SoftmaxWithLossLayer
and Caffe Loss
for more info.
I am using Pylearn2 OR Caffe to build a deep network. My target is ordered nominal. I am trying to find a proper loss function but cannot find any in Pylearn2 or Caffe.
I read a paper "Loss Functions for Preference Levels: Regression with Discrete Ordered Labels" . I get the general idea - but I am not sure I understand what will the thresholds be, if my final layer is a SoftMax over Logistic Regression (outputting probabilities).
Can some help me by pointing to any implementation of such a loss function ?
Thanks
Regards
For both pylearn2 and caffe, your labels will need to be 0-4 instead of 1-5...it's just the way they work. The output layer will be 5 units, each is a essentially a logistic unit...and the softmax can be thought of as an adaptor that normalizes the final outputs. But "softmax" is commonly used as an output type. When training, the value of any individual unit is rarely ever exactly 0.0 or 1.0...it's always a distribution across your units - which log-loss can be calculated on. This loss is used to compare against the "perfect" case and the error is back-propped to update your network weights. Note that a raw output from PL2 or Caffe is not a specific digit 0,1,2,3, or 5...it's 5 number, each associated to the likelihood of each of the 5 classes. When classifying, one just takes the class with the highest value as the 'winner'.
I'll try to give an example...
say I have a 3 class problem, I train a network with a 3 unit softmax.
the first unit represents the first class, second the second and third, third.
Say I feed a test case through and get...
0.25, 0.5, 0.25 ...0.5 is the highest, so a classifier would say "2". this is the softmax output...it makes sure the sum of the output units is one.
You should have a look at ordinal (logistic) regression. This is the formal solution to the problem setup you describe ( do not use plain regression as the distance measures of errors are wrong).
https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/140061/how-to-set-up-neural-network-to-output-ordinal-data
In particular I recommend looking at Coral ordinal regression implementation at
https://github.com/ck37/coral-ordinal/issues.