Element wise binary classification

Hi!

I was wondering which is the correct way to perform element wise binary classification using the BCEloss.

My model outputs a tensor of shape (depth, width, length) and its last activation is an element wise Sigmoid.

My target contains either 0 or 1 and has also shape (depth, width, length).

I am currently computing the loss with the default reduction “mean” and I backpropagate this.

The mean loss decreases as expected however my model predicts for all pixels probabilities that are lower than 0.5 so all the elements equal to 1 are wrongly classified.

I think that this is mainly due to the fact that the 1s are rare in the tensor.

Should I change loss? In particular I was wondering if I should use reduction=none? If yes how can I backpropagate this elementwise loss?

Thanks in advance,
Luca

Hi Luca!

As an aside, you will have better numerical stability if you use
BCEWithLogitsLoss and remove the final Sigmoid layer.

Consider using the pos_weight argument passed to the constructor
of BCEWithLogitsLoss to compensate for the rarity of “1” pixels.

A typical value for pos_weight to reweight the rare values would be
approx_number_of_1_pixels / approx_number_of_0_pixels.

(The value for pos_weight does not need to be especially precise.)

Note: You don’t need to use 0.5 as the threshold to convert predicted
probabilities (or 0.0 to threshold logits) to 0/1 values. You can lower
the threshold to predict more 1s (but using pos_weight is likely to be
the better approach).

Best.

K. Frank

1 Like

Hi KFrank,

I am grateful for your quick answer with useful suggestions.

I will try these changes :wink: