shubhendu_jena:

The convergence is much slower and converges to a much higher metric than if I remove the validation block entirely.


I would expect a slowdown in the script, if the validation loop is used since it has to be executed.
The latter issue might point towards a data leak. Did you make sure that the training and validation datasets are separate?
I’m also unsure which package you are using with the Trainer class, so I cannot comment on its internals and if they might cause some issues.