Deep learning model test accuracy unstable
I am trying to train and test a pytorch GCN model that is supposed to identify person. But the test accuracy is quite jumpy like it gives 49% at 23 epoch then goes below near 45% at 41 epoch. So it's not increasing all the time though loss seems to decrease at every epoch.
My question is not about implementation errors rather I want to know why this happens. I don't think there is something wrong in my coding as I saw SOTA architecture has this type of behavior as well. The author just picked the best result and published saying that their models gives that result.
Is it normal for the accuracy to be jumpy (up-down) and am I just to take the best ever weights that produce that?

Accuracy is naturally more &quot;jumpy&quot;, as you put it. In terms of accuracy, you have a discrete outcome for each sample - you either get it right or wrong. This makes it so that the result fluctuate, especially if you have a relatively low number of samples (as you have a higher sampling variance).
On the other hand, the loss function should vary more smoothly. It is based on the probabilities for each class calculated at your softmax layer, which means that they vary continuously. With a small enough learning rate, the loss function should vary monotonically. Any bumps you see are due to the optimization algorithm taking discrete steps, with the assumption that the loss function is roughly linear in the vicinity of the current point.
