Using the BVLC reference AlexNet file, I have been training a CNN against a training set I created. In order to measure the progress of training, I have been using a rough method to approximate the accuracy against the training data. My batch size on the test net is 256. I have ~4500 images. I perform 17 calls to solver.test_nets[0].forward() and record the value of solver.test_nets[0].blobs['accuracy'].data (the accuracy of that forward pass). I take the average across these. My thought was that I was taking 17 random samples of 256 from my validation set and getting the accuracy of these random samplings. I would expect this to closely approximate the true accuracy against the entire set. However, I later went back and wrote a script to go through each item in my LMDB so that I could generate a confusion matrix for my entire test set. I discovered that the true accuracy of my model was significantly lower than the estimated accuracy. For example, my expected accuracy of ~75% dropped to ~50% true accuracy. This is a far worse result than I was expecting.
My assumptions match the answer given here.
Have I made an incorrect assumption somewhere? What could account for the difference? I had assumed that forward() function gathered a random sample, but I'm not so sure that was the case. blobs.['accuracy'].data returned a different result (though usually within a small range) everytime, so this is why I assumed this.
The
forward()function from Caffe does not perform any random sampling, it will only fetch the next batch according to yourDataLayer. E.g., in your caseforward()will pass the next 256 images in your network. Performing this 17 times will pass sequentially17x256=4352images.Check that the script that goes through your whole LMDB performs the same data pre-processing as during training.