When I use u-net for semantic segmentation of two categories, my output in the last layer of the model is set to 1 channel and 2 channel respectively. Then I use cross-entropy loss to measure: BCEloss and CrossEntropyLoss. But the gap between the two is great. The performance of the former is normal, but the latter has a very low precision rate and a high recall rate. I used pytorch.
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Mathematically BCEloss (logist) is just a special case of CrossEntropy loss for the case of two classes.
Are you using a sigmoid or softmax in the output of the network? In PyTorch, CrossEntropy loss takes the raw output of the last layer (no need for softmax the output), that is done for numerical stability.
BCEloss only takes input in between 0 and 1. So a sigmoid is needed there. However, PyTorch has The BCEWithLogistLoss that applies the sigmoid for you, this version is more stable.
One more thing that it seems you are not doing correctly. (it would be nicer to have some minimum amount of code to better understand your problem). CrossEntropyLoss requires one channel per class. So if you have 2 classes, you have to give it an input with two channels. The logist (BCEloss) only takes one channel with a number ranging between 0 and 1. If I understood correctly, you are somehow giving it 2 channels. That will bring you problems in training.
My best guess is that the gap in performance between the two is due to misuse of the loss functions. The PyTorch documentation has improved a lot, I can recomend you spending a few minutes understanding the difference between each those three loss functions: https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/nn.html#loss-functions .