Training Guidelines

This page includes a summary of suggested guidelines to follow for training, and best practices based on research and community testing. Note these guidelines may not be optimal for every single architecture, where each may have their own individual quirks.

Training Schedule

When training from scratch, the general strategy is to train the model with easy to learn tasks before difficult tasks. So to train a 4x scale model to handle degradations, a common process is:

  1. Train 2x bicubic from scratch:

    • LR images are simply bicubic downscales of the HR images.

    • Only MS-SSIM L1 loss is enabled.

    • The training settings of the official paper models are often a safe choice for batch size, crop size, scheduler milestones, and total iterations. The training settings are often available on their GitHub repo or described in their paper. For example the training settings for DAT_2_X2 are here:

      • This model is trained until validation metrics peak, which is often at least 500,000 iterations, depending on the architecture

      • With the AdamW optimizer, the learning rate is 2e-4 when training from scratch

      • Larger batch size benefits training from scratch. Gradient accumulation can be used to train with a larger effective batch size. For example the official DAT 2 training settings use a batch size of 8 per GPU on 4 NVIDIA A100 GPUs which is a total batch size of 32. A single RTX 4090 does not have enough VRAM to train 2x DAT 2 with batch 32, but it can be trained with batch 8 and accum_iter 4, for a total effective batch size of 32.

    • The *_fromscratch.yml templates are set up to train with these settings

    • This model is your 2x pretrain

  2. Train 4x bicubic:

    • Use the 2x pretrain from the previous step as a pretrain for this 4x model, with strict_load_g set to False

    • The LR images are bicubic downcsales of the HR images

    • Only MS-SSIM L1 loss is enabled

    • The same batch and lq crop size (lq_size) from the 2x training settings are used for the 4x training settings. The training settings of the official paper models are a safe choice for scheduler milestones and total iterations.

      • This model is trained until validation metrics peak, which often ranges from 50,000 iterations for lighter architectures to 250,000+ iterations for heavier ones

      • The learning rate is reduced to 1e-4 when finetuning.

    • This model is your 4x pretrain

  3. Train 4x with degadations

    • Use the 4x pretrain from the previous step as a pretrain for this 4x model, with strict_load_g set to True

    • The LR images are degraded with the types of degradations you want the model to handle, such as JPEG or h264

    • All of the typical losses are enabled for this step: MS-SSIM L1, Perceptual, HSLuv, GAN

    • The learning rate is 1e-4 for the generator and discriminator optimizers

    • This stage of training benefits from larger lq_size and batch size can be reduced to allow larger lq_size

    • This model is trained until it looks good. You can also look at validation metrics, but your eyes should be the final judge

    • The *_finetune.yml templates are set up to train with these settings