Validating intuition of training progress before investing in full fine-tuning effort about voice-type-classifier HOT 2 CLOSED

During training we noted that the denominator reported in the progress bar (10,800) and the duration of training (~7 hours) for the initial epoch (see screenshot below) was considerably more than for the subsequent epoches (101 through 106), where the denominator was 1,350 and duration of training was less than 1 hour each.

This was a little confusing given that it appears 6 separates models were used for prediction (which aligns to our 6 sets of model weights resulting from our training) however our understanding was that the validate step would select the single best performing model and apply that alone. So we are unclear why the 'apply' command would assess all 6 models, and assuming this is the case, we see once again a dramatic difference in duration of time required for this assessment between the first interation and subsequent ones (9min:45sec for the first versus less than 2 minutes for the rest).