I seem to keep going back and forth on whether to have one giant model computing both steering and gas, or separate models. This week was one huge model. In fact, it was even more huge than before, as I downloaded another 2x DeepDrive data. This also meant going through the data again to remove bad sections. The data itself isn’t corrupt, but there are scenes where the car drives off a cliff…

Even with more data and a fair bit of training, though, I was running into overfitting problems. The regularization from last week helped, but it wasn’t enough. Isaac Gerg was kind enough to suggest adding Dropout layers, and off stream that did help. But the model is still pretty crummy. It may just need more data given how generally noisy it is.

I may also build a “backup” model. Where, instead of trying to learn correct driving behavior, the car goes forward until it hits something, then backs up and turns a random direction. Call it the “Roomba Initiative”.