Changing input dimension for AlexNet - conv-neural-network

Question

I am beginner and I am trying to implement AlexNet for image classification. The pytorch implementation of AlexNet is as follows:
class AlexNet(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, num_classes=1000):
super(AlexNet, self).__init__()
self.features = nn.Sequential(
nn.Conv2d(3, 64, kernel_size=11, stride=4, padding=2),
nn.ReLU(inplace=True),
nn.MaxPool2d(kernel_size=3, stride=2),
nn.Conv2d(64, 192, kernel_size=5, padding=2),
nn.ReLU(inplace=True),
nn.MaxPool2d(kernel_size=3, stride=2),
nn.Conv2d(192, 384, kernel_size=3, padding=1),
nn.ReLU(inplace=True),
nn.Conv2d(384, 256, kernel_size=3, padding=1),
nn.ReLU(inplace=True),
nn.Conv2d(256, 256, kernel_size=3, padding=1),
nn.ReLU(inplace=True),
nn.MaxPool2d(kernel_size=3, stride=2),
)
self.avgpool = nn.AdaptiveAvgPool2d((6, 6))
self.classifier = nn.Sequential(
nn.Dropout(),
nn.Linear(256 * 6 * 6, 4096),
nn.ReLU(inplace=True),
nn.Dropout(),
nn.Linear(4096, 4096),
nn.ReLU(inplace=True),
nn.Linear(4096, num_classes),
)
def forward(self, x):
x = self.features(x)
x = self.avgpool(x)
x = x.view(x.size(0), 256 * 6 * 6)
x = self.classifier(x)
return x
However I am trying to implement the network for a input size of (3,448,224) with num of classes = 8.
I have no idea on how to change x.view in the forward method and how many layers I should drop to get optimum performance. Please help.

Answer 1

As stated in https://github.com/pytorch/vision/releases:
Since, most of the pretrained models provided in torchvision (the newest version) already added self.avgpool = nn.AdaptiveAvgPool2d((size, size)) to resolve the incompatibility with input size. So you don't have to care about it so much.
Below is the code, very short.
import torchvision
import torch.nn as nn
num_classes = 8
model = torchvision.models.alexnet(pretrained=True)
# replace the last classifier
model.classifier[6] = nn.Linear(4096, num_classes)
# now you can trained it with your dataset of size (3, 448, 224)
Transfer learning
There are two popular ways to do transfer learning. Suppose that we trained a model M in very large dataset D_large, now we would like to transfer the "knowledge" learned by the model M to our new model, M', on other datasets such as D_other (which has a smaller size than that of D_large).
Use (most) parts of M as the architecture of our new M' and initialize those parts with the weights trained on D_large. We can start training the model M' on the dataset D_other and let it learn the weights of those above parts from M to find the optimal weights on our new dataset. This is usually referred as fine-tuning the model M'.
Same as the above method except that before training M' we freeze all the parameters of those parts and start training M' on our dataset D_other. In both cases, those parts from M are mostly the first components in the model M' (the base). However, in this case, we refer those parts of M as the model to extract the features from the input dataset (or feature extractor). The accuracy obtained from the two methods may differ a little to some extent. However, this method guarantees the model doesn't overfit on the small dataset. It's a good point in terms of accuracy. On the other hands, when we freeze the weights of M, we don't need to store some intermediate values (the hidden outputs from each hidden layer) in the forward pass and also don't need to compute the gradients during the backward pass. This improves the speed of training and reduces the memory required during training.
The implementation
Along with Alexnet, a lot of pretrained models on ImageNet is already provided by Facebook team such as ResNet, VGG.
To fit your requirements the most in the aspect of model size, it would be nice to use VGG11, and ResNet which have fewest parameters in their model family.
I just pick VGG11 as an example:
Obtain a pretrained model from torchvision.
Freeze the all the parameters of this model.
Replace the last layer in the model by your new Linear layer to perform your classification. This means that you can reuse all most everything of M to M'.
import torchvision
# obtain the pretrained model
model = torchvision.models.vgg11(pretrained=True)
# freeze the params
for param in net.parameters():
param.requires_grad = False
# replace with your classifier
num_classes = 8
net.classifier[6] = nn.Linear(in_features=4096, out_features=num_classes)
# start training with your dataset
Warnings
In the old torchvision package version, there is no self.avgpool = nn.AdaptiveAvgPool2d((size, size)) which makes harder to train on our input size which is different from [3, 224, 224] used in training ImageNet. You can do a little effort as below:
class OurVGG11(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, num_classes=8):
super(OurVGG11, self).__init__()
self.vgg11 = torchvision.models.vgg11(pretrained=True)
for param in self.vgg11.parameters():
param.requires_grad = False
# Add a avgpool here
self.avgpool = nn.AdaptiveAvgPool2d((7, 7))
# Replace the classifier layer
self.vgg11.classifier[-1] = nn.Linear(4096, num_classes)
def forward(self, x):
x = self.vgg11.features(x)
x = self.avgpool(x)
x = x.view(x.size(0), 512 * 7 * 7)
x = self.vgg11.classifier(x)
return x
model = OurVGG11()
# now start training `model` on our dataset.
Try out with different models in torchvision.models.