Early Stopping¶
Stopping an Epoch Early¶
You can stop and skip the rest of the current epoch early by overriding on_train_batch_start()
to return -1
when some condition is met.
If you do this repeatedly, for every epoch you had originally requested, then this will stop your entire training.
EarlyStopping Callback¶
The EarlyStopping
callback can be used to monitor a metric and stop the training when no improvement is observed.
To enable it:
Import
EarlyStopping
callback.Log the metric you want to monitor using
log()
method.Init the callback, and set
monitor
to the logged metric of your choice.Set the
mode
based on the metric needs to be monitored.Pass the
EarlyStopping
callback to theTrainer
callbacks flag.
from lightning.pytorch.callbacks.early_stopping import EarlyStopping
class LitModel(LightningModule):
def validation_step(self, batch, batch_idx):
loss = ...
self.log("val_loss", loss)
model = LitModel()
trainer = Trainer(callbacks=[EarlyStopping(monitor="val_loss", mode="min")])
trainer.fit(model)
You can customize the callbacks behaviour by changing its parameters.
early_stop_callback = EarlyStopping(monitor="val_accuracy", min_delta=0.00, patience=3, verbose=False, mode="max")
trainer = Trainer(callbacks=[early_stop_callback])
Additional parameters that stop training at extreme points:
stopping_threshold
: Stops training immediately once the monitored quantity reaches this threshold. It is useful when we know that going beyond a certain optimal value does not further benefit us.divergence_threshold
: Stops training as soon as the monitored quantity becomes worse than this threshold. When reaching a value this bad, we believes the model cannot recover anymore and it is better to stop early and run with different initial conditions.check_finite
: When turned on, it stops training if the monitored metric becomes NaN or infinite.check_on_train_epoch_end
: When turned on, it checks the metric at the end of a training epoch. Use this only when you are monitoring any metric logged within training-specific hooks on epoch-level.
In case you need early stopping in a different part of training, subclass EarlyStopping
and change where it is called:
class MyEarlyStopping(EarlyStopping):
def on_validation_end(self, trainer, pl_module):
# override this to disable early stopping at the end of val loop
pass
def on_train_end(self, trainer, pl_module):
# instead, do it at the end of training loop
self._run_early_stopping_check(trainer)
Note
The EarlyStopping
callback runs
at the end of every validation epoch by default. However, the frequency of validation
can be modified by setting various parameters in the Trainer
,
for example check_val_every_n_epoch
and val_check_interval
.
It must be noted that the patience
parameter counts the number of
validation checks with no improvement, and not the number of training epochs.
Therefore, with parameters check_val_every_n_epoch=10
and patience=3
, the trainer
will perform at least 40 training epochs before being stopped.