picklerick:

or does anyone have better suggestions when hitting road blocks like this?


I would recommend to scale down the problem and try to overfit a very small dataset (e.g. just 10 samples) by playing around with the hyperparameters.
Due to the small dataset size these experiments would be very fast so that you should be able to quickly overfit the sample.
If that doesn’t work, your training or model might have some bugs or might not be suitable for the problem.