Adding batch normalization decreases the performance
I'm using PyTorch to implement a classification network for skeleton-based action recognition. The model consists of three convolutional layers and two fully connected layers. This base model gave me an accuracy of around 70% in the NTU-RGB+D dataset. I wanted to learn more about batch normalization, so I added a batch normalization for all the layers except for the last one. To my surprise, the evaluation accuracy dropped to 60% rather than increasing But the training accuracy has increased from 80% to 90%. Can anyone say what am I doing wrong? or Adding batch normalization need not increase the accuracy? 




The model with batch normalization

class BaseModelV0p2(nn.Module):

    def __init__(self, num_person, num_joint, num_class, num_coords):
        super().__init__()
        self.name = 'BaseModelV0p2'
        self.num_person = num_person
        self.num_joint = num_joint
        self.num_class = num_class
        self.channels = num_coords
        self.out_channel = [32, 64, 128]
        self.loss = loss
        self.metric = metric
        self.bn_momentum = 0.01

        self.bn_cv1 = nn.BatchNorm2d(self.out_channel[0], momentum=self.bn_momentum)
        self.conv1 = nn.Sequential(nn.Conv2d(in_channels=self.channels, out_channels=self.out_channel[0],
                                             kernel_size=3, stride=1, padding=1),
                                   self.bn_cv1,
                                    nn.ReLU(),
                                    nn.MaxPool2d(kernel_size=2, stride=2))

        self.bn_cv2 = nn.BatchNorm2d(self.out_channel[1], momentum=self.bn_momentum)
        self.conv2 = nn.Sequential(nn.Conv2d(in_channels=self.out_channel[0], out_channels=self.out_channel[1],
                                            kernel_size=3, stride=1, padding=1),
                                   self.bn_cv2,
                                nn.ReLU(),
                                nn.MaxPool2d(kernel_size=2, stride=2))

        self.bn_cv3 = nn.BatchNorm2d(self.out_channel[2], momentum=self.bn_momentum)
        self.conv3 = nn.Sequential(nn.Conv2d(in_channels=self.out_channel[1], out_channels=self.out_channel[2],
                                            kernel_size=3, stride=1, padding=1),
                                   self.bn_cv3,
                                  nn.ReLU(),
                                  nn.MaxPool2d(kernel_size=2, stride=2))

        self.bn_fc1 = nn.BatchNorm1d(256 * 2, momentum=self.bn_momentum)
        self.fc1 = nn.Sequential(nn.Linear(self.out_channel[2]*8*3, 256*2),
                                 self.bn_fc1,
                                 nn.ReLU(),
                                 nn.Dropout2d(p=0.5))  # TO check

        self.fc2 = nn.Sequential(nn.Linear(256*2, self.num_class))

    def forward(self, input):
        list_bn_layers = [self.bn_fc1, self.bn_cv3, self.bn_cv2, self.bn_cv1]
        # set the momentum  of the batch norm layers to given momentum value during trianing and 0 during evaluation
        # ref: https://discuss.pytorch.org/t/model-eval-gives-incorrect-loss-for-model-with-batchnorm-layers/7561
        # ref: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/4741
        for bn_layer in list_bn_layers:
            if self.training:
                bn_layer.momentum = self.bn_momentum
            else:
                bn_layer.momentum = 0

        logits = []
        for i in range(self.num_person):
            out = self.conv1(input[:, :, :, :, i])

            out = self.conv2(out)

            out = self.conv3(out)

            logits.append(out)

        out = torch.max(logits[0], logits[1])
        out = out.view(out.size(0), -1)
        out = self.fc1(out)
        out = self.fc2(out)

        t = out

        assert not ((t != t).any())  # find out nan in tensor
        assert not (t.abs().sum() == 0)  # find out 0 tensor

        return out


My interpretation of the phenomenon you are observing,, is that instead of reducing the covariance shift, which is what the Batch Normalization is meant for, you are increasing it. In other words, instead of decrease the distribution differences between train and test, you are increasing it and that's what it is causing you to have a bigger difference in the accuracies between train and test. Batch Normalization does not assure better performance always, but for some problems it doesn't work well. I have several ideas that could lead to an improvement:

Increase the batch size if it is small, what would help the mean and std calculated in the Batch Norm layers to be more robust estimates of the population parameters.
Decrease the bn_momentum parameter a bit, to see if that also stabilizes the Batch Norm parameters.
I am not sure you should set bn_momentum to zero when test, I think you should just call model.train() when you want to train and model.eval() when you want to use your trained model to perform inference.
You could alternatively try Layer Normalization instead of Batch Normalization, cause it does not require accumulating any statistic and usually works well
Try regularizing a bit your model using dropout
Make sure you shuffle your training set in every epoch. Not shuffling the data set may lead to correlated batches that make the statistics in batch normalization cycle. That may impact your generalization
I hope any of these ideas work for you

