How to get non-negative integer predictions from a regression model?

vision
#1

I’m using a pretrained VGG19 and fine-tuning (freezing the conv layers) its classifier parts (i.e. 3x linear layers).

loss = torch.nn.MSELoss(output, target)

where

output = [13.7210, 1.6992, -0.1286, -0.9545, -0.9148, 2.3547], and
target = [ 0., 0., 0., 0., 14., 1.]) (each element is a count of respective class)

The calculated loss is 169.3941 that is completely useless since overall loss tends to increase as the model sees more and more images. Why I’m not getting the predictions closer to the targets?

#2

If your model training is diverging, you could use “bad” hyperparameters such as a high learning rate or there might be a bug in your code (such as forgetting to zero out the gradients).
As quick test I would recommend to overfit a small data sample (e.g. just 10 samples) and make sure your model is able to fit them perfectly.

#3

You probably need PoissonNLLLoss