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Why is my transfer learning implementation of VGG19 not improving accuracy?

I want to use the pretrained VGG19 (with imagenet weights) to build a two class classifier using a dataset of about 2.5k images that i've curated and split into 2 classes. It seems that not only is training taking a very long time, but accuracy seems to not increase in the slightest.
Here's my implementation:
def transferVGG19(train_dataset, val_dataset):
# conv_model = VGG19(weights='imagenet', include_top=False, input_shape=(224, 224, 3))
conv_model = VGG19(
include_top=True,
weights="imagenet",
input_tensor=None,
input_shape=(224, 224, 3),
pooling=None,
classes=1000,
classifier_activation="softmax",
)
for layer in conv_model.layers:
layer.trainable = False
input = layers.Input(shape=(224, 224, 3))
scale_layer = layers.Rescaling(scale=1 / 127.5, offset=-1)
x = scale_layer(input)
x = conv_model(x, training=False)
x = layers.Dense(256, activation='relu')(x)
x = layers.Dropout(0.5)(x)
x = layers.Dense(64, activation='relu')(x)
predictions = layers.Dense(1, activation='softmax')(x)
full_model = models.Model(inputs=input, outputs=predictions)
full_model.summary()
full_model.compile(loss='binary_crossentropy',
optimizer='adam',
metrics=['acc'])
history = full_model.fit(
train_dataset,
epochs=10,
validation_data=val_dataset,
workers=10,
)
Model performance seems to be awful...
I imagine this behaviour comes from my rudimentary understanding of how layers work and how to best the new model's architecture. As VGG19 is trained on 1000 classes, i saw it best fit to add to the output a couple of dense layers to reduce the size of the feature maps, as well as a dropout layer in between to randomly discard neurons and help ease the risk of overfitting. At first i suspected i might have dropped too many neurons, but i was expecting my network to learn slower rather than not at all.
Is there something obviously wrong in my implementation that would cause such poor performance? Any explanation is welcomed. Just to mention, i would rule out the dataset as an issue because i've implemented transfer learning on Xception and have managed to get 98% validation accuracy that was monotonously increasing over 20 epochs. That implementation used different layers (i can provide it if necessary) because i was experimenting with different network layouts.

TLDR; Change include_top= True to False
Explaination-
Model graphs are represented in inverted manner i.e last layers are shown at the top and initial layers are shown at bottom.
When include_top=False, the top dense layers which are used for classification and not representation of data are removed from the pretrained VGG model. Only till the last conv2D layers are preserved.
During transfer-learning, you need to keep the learned representation layers intact and only learn the classification part for your data. Hence you are adding your stack of classification layers i.e.
x = layers.Dense(256, activation='relu')(x)
x = layers.Dropout(0.5)(x)
x = layers.Dense(64, activation='relu')(x)
predictions = layers.Dense(1, activation='softmax')(x)
If you keep the top classification layers of VGG, it will give 1000 probabilities for 1000 classes due to softmax activation at its top layer in model graph.This activation is not relu. We dont need softmax in intermediate layer as softmax "squishes" the unscaled inputs so that sum(input) = 1. Effectively it produces a smooth software defined approximation of argmax. Hence your accuracy is suffering.

What is the correct method to construct a many-to-many LSTM model using Keras in Python?

I am trying to make a 3 sequence many-to-many LSTM model, but I am confused about it's implementation in Keras. I searched on internet for examples of many-to-many models, but each website gives different method. That has confused me even more. What is the correct method of those? I want a model like this:
Some of the various methods I found were
Using encoder, decoder
from keras.layers import RepeatVector
from keras.layers import TimeDistributed
model = Sequential()
# encoder layer
model.add(LSTM(100, activation='relu', input_shape=(3, 1)))
# repeat vector
model.add(RepeatVector(3))
# decoder layer
model.add(LSTM(100, activation='relu', return_sequences=True))
model.add(TimeDistributed(Dense(1)))
model.compile(optimizer='adam', loss='mse')
Another with encoder, decoder
from keras.models import Model
from keras.layers import Input, LSTM, Dense
encoder_inputs = Input(shape=(None, 1))
encoder = LSTM(100, return_state=True)
encoder_outputs, state_h, state_c = encoder(encoder_inputs)
encoder_states = [state_h, state_c]
decoder_inputs = Input(shape=(None, 1))
decoder_lstm = LSTM(100, return_sequences=True, return_state=True)
decoder_outputs, _, _ = decoder_lstm(decoder_inputs,
initial_state=encoder_states)
decoder_dense = Dense(num_decoder_tokens, activation='softmax')
decoder_outputs = decoder_dense(decoder_outputs)
model = Model([encoder_inputs, decoder_inputs], decoder_outputs)
model = Sequential()
model.add(LSTM(100,input_shape=(3,1),return_sequences=True))
model.add(TimeDistributed(Dense(2)))
model.compile(optimizer='adam', loss='mse')
model = Sequential()
model.add(LSTM(100,input_shape=(3,1),return_sequences=True))
model.compile(optimizer='adam', loss='mse')
Which one of these is the correct method? which one will give the model like the one I want?

You have to mention your problem statement first.
1 and 2 are best for neural machine translation problems. While 2 is superior because it is considering return states in LSTM layer. 3 is also a good architecture where logic from input to output is simple. 4 is a very basic architecture becuase nth output in the output array has knowledge about [0 to n-1th input, not later ones] also no fully connected (Dense) layer so even moderate logic cannot be learned here.

Text classification CNN overfits training

I am trying to use a CNN architecture to classify text sentences. The architecture of the network is as follows:
text_input = Input(shape=X_train_vec.shape[1:], name = "Text_input")
conv2 = Conv1D(filters=128, kernel_size=5, activation='relu')(text_input)
drop21 = Dropout(0.5)(conv2)
pool1 = MaxPooling1D(pool_size=2)(drop21)
conv22 = Conv1D(filters=64, kernel_size=5, activation='relu')(pool1)
drop22 = Dropout(0.5)(conv22)
pool2 = MaxPooling1D(pool_size=2)(drop22)
dense = Dense(16, activation='relu')(pool2)
flat = Flatten()(dense)
dense = Dense(128, activation='relu')(flat)
out = Dense(32, activation='relu')(dense)
outputs = Dense(y_train.shape[1], activation='softmax')(out)
model = Model(inputs=text_input, outputs=outputs)
# compile
model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
I have some callbacks as early_stopping and reduceLR to stop the training and to reduce the learning rate when the validation loss is not improving (reducing).
early_stopping = EarlyStopping(monitor='val_loss',
patience=5)
model_checkpoint = ModelCheckpoint(filepath=checkpoint_filepath,
save_weights_only=False,
monitor='val_loss',
mode="auto",
save_best_only=True)
learning_rate_decay = ReduceLROnPlateau(monitor='val_loss',
factor=0.1,
patience=2,
verbose=1,
mode='auto',
min_delta=0.0001,
cooldown=0,
min_lr=0)
Once the model is trained the history of the training goes as follows:
We can observe here that the validation loss is not improving from epoch 5 on and that the training loss is being overfitted with each step.
I will like to know if I'm doing something wrong in the architecture of the CNN? Aren't enough the dropout layers to avoid the overfitting? Which are other ways to reduce overfitting?
Any suggestion?
Thanks in advance.
Edit:
I have tried also with regularization an the result where even worse:
kernel_regularizer=l2(0.01), bias_regularizer=l2(0.01)
Edit 2:
I have tried to apply BatchNormalization layers after each convolution and the result is the next one:
norm = BatchNormalization()(conv2)
Edit 3:
After applying the LSTM architecture:
text_input = Input(shape=X_train_vec.shape[1:], name = "Text_input")
conv2 = Conv1D(filters=128, kernel_size=5, activation='relu')(text_input)
drop21 = Dropout(0.5)(conv2)
conv22 = Conv1D(filters=64, kernel_size=5, activation='relu')(drop21)
drop22 = Dropout(0.5)(conv22)
lstm1 = Bidirectional(LSTM(128, return_sequences = True))(drop22)
lstm2 = Bidirectional(LSTM(64, return_sequences = True))(lstm1)
flat = Flatten()(lstm2)
dense = Dense(128, activation='relu')(flat)
out = Dense(32, activation='relu')(dense)
outputs = Dense(y_train.shape[1], activation='softmax')(out)
model = Model(inputs=text_input, outputs=outputs)
# compile
model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])

overfitting can caused by many factors, it happens when your model fits too well to the training set.
To handle it you can do some ways:
Add more data
Use data augmentation
Use architectures that generalize well
Add regularization (mostly dropout, L1/L2 regularization are also possible)
Reduce architecture complexity.
for more clearly you can read in https://towardsdatascience.com/deep-learning-3-more-on-cnns-handling-overfitting-2bd5d99abe5d

This is screaming Transfer Learning. google-unversal-sentence-encoder is perfect for this use case. Replace your model with
import tensorflow_hub as hub
import tensorflow_text
text_input = Input(shape=X_train_vec.shape[1:], name = "Text_input")
# this next layer might need some tweaking dimension wise, to correctly fit
# X_train in the model
text_input = tf.keras.layers.Lambda(lambda x: tf.squeeze(x))(text_input)
# conv2 = Conv1D(filters=128, kernel_size=5, activation='relu')(text_input)
# drop21 = Dropout(0.5)(conv2)
# pool1 = MaxPooling1D(pool_size=2)(drop21)
# conv22 = Conv1D(filters=64, kernel_size=5, activation='relu')(pool1)
# drop22 = Dropout(0.5)(conv22)
# pool2 = MaxPooling1D(pool_size=2)(drop22)
# 1) you might need `text_input = tf.expand_dims(text_input, axis=0)` here
# 2) If you're classifying English only, you can use the link to the normal `google-universal-sentence-encoder`, not the multilingual one
# 3) both the English and multilingual have a `-large` version. More accurate but slower to train and infer.
embedded = hub.KerasLayer('https://tfhub.dev/google/universal-sentence-encoder-multilingual/3')(text_input)
# this layer seems out of place,
# dense = Dense(16, activation='relu')(embedded)
# you don't need to flatten after a dense layer (in your case) or a backbone (in my case (google-universal-sentence-encoder))
# flat = Flatten()(dense)
dense = Dense(128, activation='relu')(flat)
out = Dense(32, activation='relu')(dense)
outputs = Dense(y_train.shape[1], activation='softmax')(out)
model = Model(inputs=text_input, outputs=outputs)

I think since you are doing a text Classification, adding 1 or 2 LSTM layers might help the network learn better, since it will be able to better associate with the context of the data. I suggest adding the following code before the flatten layer.
lstm1 = Bidirectional(LSTM(128, return_sequence = True))
lstm2 = Bidirectional(LSTM(64))
LSTM layers can help neural network learn association between certain words and might improve the accuracy of your network.
I also Suggest dropping the Max Pooling layers as max pooling especially in text classification can lead the network to drop some of the useful features.
Just keep the convolutional Layers and the dropout. Also remove the Dense layer before flatten and add the aforementioned LSTMs.

It is unclear how you feed the text into your model. I am assuming that you tokenize the text to represent it as a sequence of integers, but do you use any word embedding prior to feeding it into your model? If not, I suggest you to throw atrainable tensorflow Embedding layer at the start of your model. There is a clever technique called Embedding Lookup to speed up its training, but you can save it for later. Try adding this layer to your model. Then your Conv1D layer would have a much easier time working on a sequence of floats. Also, I suggest you throw BatchNormalization after each Conv1D, it should help to speed up convergence and training.

Doubts about TensorFlow Keras

I was reading this tutorial when a doubt appeared. In the tutorial de dataset has 10 attributes (after the one-hot conversion), but when the model was created, the input layer has more neurons (64) than inputs (10).
Here's the code:
def build_model():
model = keras.Sequential([
layers.Dense(64, activation='relu', input_shape=[len(train_dataset.keys())]),
layers.Dense(64, activation='relu'),
layers.Dense(1)
])
optimizer = tf.keras.optimizers.RMSprop(0.001)
model.compile(loss='mse',
optimizer=optimizer,
metrics=['mae', 'mse'])
return model
I thought that the number of neurons should be equals to the number of entries. Can anyone explain this?
Thanks for your attention

The 64 in your Dense layers specifies the number of neurons of the first and second hidden layers. The input_shape parameter specifies how keras will automatically handle the number of neurons in the input layer, so 10 in your case.

Sudden spike in validation loss

So I am doing binary image classification on a small data set containing 250 images in each class, I am using transfer learning using Resnet50 as base network architecture and over it I've added 2 hidden layer and one final output layer, after training for 20 epochs, what I've saw is that loss is suddenly increases in initial epoch, I am unable to understand the reason behind it.
Network architecture -
image_input = Input(shape=(224, 224, 3))
model = ResNet50(input_tensor=image_input,include_top=True, weights='imagenet')
last_layer = model.get_layer('avg_pool').output
x = Flatten(name='flatten')(last_layer)
x = Dense(1000, activation='relu', name='fc1000')(x)
x = Dropout(0.5)(x)
x = Dense(200, activation='relu', name='fc200')(x)
x = Dropout(0.5)(x)
out = Dense(num_classes, activation='softmax', name='output')(x)
custom_model = Model(image_input, out)
I am using binary_crossentropy, Adam with default parameters
Loss -
Accuracy -

With such small class of data, there is definitely chance of overfitting do increase your dataset size and check it out use data augmentation if possible