TensorFlow Queues and Validation
By Eric Antoine ScuccimarraI am currently working with a dataset that is far too large to store in memory so I am using tfrecords and queues to feed the data in. This works great, except that I was not able to evaluate the model on the validation dataset every epoch like I usually do.
After spending quite a bit of time trying to figure out ways around this, none of which worked, I found an easy solution that does work.
batch, labels = read_and_decode_single_example([train_path])
X_def, y_def = tf.train.shuffle_batch([image, label], batch_size=8, capacity=2000, min_after_dequeue=1000)
X = tf.placeholder_with_default(X_def, shape=[None, 299, 299, 1])
y = tf.placeholder_with_default(y_def, shape=[None])
I have a function that reads that data in from the tfrecords file (read_and_decode_single_example()). I then create the default features and labels using shuffle batch. Finally I create X and y as placeholders with default, with the shuffled batches as the defaults.
Then when I am training I don't pass the feed dict, and it defaults to using the data from the tfrecords file. When it is time to evaluate, I pass the data in via a feed_dict and it uses that.
This is not a great solution, it is kind of ugly, and it does require loading the validation data into memory, but it works and is simple. I had also tried using tf.cond() to switch between reading the data from a train.tfrecords file and a test.tfrecords file but was unable to get that to work.
The research I did indicates that the preferred way to handle this is to use different sessions, or different graphs with weight sharing, but that just seems ridiculous to me. It shouldn't be that complicated.