Unable to parse - xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError: syntax error: line 1, column 0

I'm a complete beginner, 0 knowledge, and was instructed to follow this guide. The guide explains how to train and detect objects.

After several installs/uninstalls and setting everything up, I seem to have reached my wall.
Using aXeleRate, it tells me to use TensorFlow ver 1.15 and (or?) TensorFlowgpu ver 1.15, or less than 2.0 .

Here is the message I get after running python axelerate/train.py -c configs /raccoon_detector.json

Failed to load pre-trained weights for the whole model. It might be because you didn't specify any or the weight file cannot be found
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "axelerate/train.py", line 184, in
setup_training(config_file=args.config)
File "axelerate/train.py", line 169, in setup_training
return(train_from_config(config, dirname))
File "axelerate/train.py", line 147, in train_from_config
config['train']['valid_metric'])
File "C:\Users\forme\miniconda3\envs\yolo\lib\site-packages\axelerate\networks\yolo\frontend.py", line 126, in train
is_only_detect=False)
File "C:\Users\forme\miniconda3\envs\yolo\lib\site-packages\axelerate\networks\yolo\backend\utils\annotation.py", line 40, in get_train_annotations
is_only_detect)
File "C:\Users\forme\miniconda3\envs\yolo\lib\site-packages\axelerate\networks\yolo\backend\utils\annotation.py", line 174, in parse_annotation
fname = parser.get_fname(annotation_file)
File "C:\Users\forme\miniconda3\envs\yolo\lib\site-packages\axelerate\networks\yolo\backend\utils\annotation.py", line 75, in get_fname
root = self._root_tag(annotation_file)
File "C:\Users\forme\miniconda3\envs\yolo\lib\site-packages\axelerate\networks\yolo\backend\utils\annotation.py", line 148, in _root_tag
tree = parse(fname)
File "C:\Users\forme\miniconda3\envs\yolo\lib\xml\etree\ElementTree.py", line 1197, in parse
tree.parse(source, parser)
File "C:\Users\forme\miniconda3\envs\yolo\lib\xml\etree\ElementTree.py", line 598, in parse
self._root = parser._parse_whole(source)
xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError: syntax error: line 1, column 0

I read the issue this was last posted on but no method to resolve has been found.