Running 10 epochs on the Food-101 dataset

Question

I’m currently working on the Food-101 dataset. I want to train a model that is greater than 85% accuracy for top-1 for the test set, using a ResNet50 or smaller network with a reasonable set of augmentations. I’m running 10 epochs using ResNet34 and I’m currently on the 8th epoch. This is how its doing:

epoch   train_loss  valid_loss  error_rate  time
0   2.526382    1.858536    0.465891    25:21
1   1.981913    1.566125    0.406881    27:21
2   1.748959    1.419548    0.372129    27:16
3   1.611638    1.315319    0.346980    25:16
4   1.568304    1.250232    0.328069    24:43
5   1.438499    1.193816    0.313762    24:26
6   1.378019    1.156924    0.307426    24:30
7   1.331075    1.131671    0.299010    24:26
8   1.314978    1.115857    0.297079    24:24

As you can see, it doesn’t seem like I’m going to do better than 71% accuracy at this point. The dataset size is 101,000. It has 101 different kinds of food and each food has a 1000 images. Training this definitely takes long but what are some things I can do to improve its accuracy?

Answer 1

try using an adjustable learning rate. Keras has a number of callbacks that are useful for this purpose. The ReduceLROnPlateau callback can be used to monitor validation loss and reduce the learning rate by a factor if the validation loss does not decrease after a user specified number of epochs. The ModelCheckpoint callback is useful to monitor the validation loss and save the model with the lowest loss which can then be used to make predictions. Documentation is here.