PyTorch autograd - 只能为标量输出隐式创建grad

Question

I am using the autograd tool in PyTorch , and have found myself in a situation where I need to access the values in a 1D tensor by means of an integer index. Something like this:

def basic_fun(x_cloned):
    res = []
    for i in range(len(x)):
        res.append(x_cloned[i] * x_cloned[i])
    print(res)
    return Variable(torch.FloatTensor(res))


def get_grad(inp, grad_var):
    A = basic_fun(inp)
    A.backward()
    return grad_var.grad


x = Variable(torch.FloatTensor([1, 2, 3, 4, 5]), requires_grad=True)
x_cloned = x.clone()
print(get_grad(x_cloned, x))

I am getting the following error message:

[tensor(1., grad_fn=<ThMulBackward>), tensor(4., grad_fn=<ThMulBackward>), tensor(9., grad_fn=<ThMulBackward>), tensor(16., grad_fn=<ThMulBackward>), tensor(25., grad_fn=<ThMulBackward>)]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/mhy/projects/pytorch-optim/predict.py", line 74, in <module>
    print(get_grad(x_cloned, x))
  File "/home/mhy/projects/pytorch-optim/predict.py", line 68, in get_grad
    A.backward()
  File "/home/mhy/.local/lib/python3.5/site-packages/torch/tensor.py", line 93, in backward
    torch.autograd.backward(self, gradient, retain_graph, create_graph)
  File "/home/mhy/.local/lib/python3.5/site-packages/torch/autograd/__init__.py", line 90, in backward
    allow_unreachable=True)  # allow_unreachable flag
RuntimeError: element 0 of tensors does not require grad and does not have a grad_fn

I am in general, a bit skeptical about how using the cloned version of a variable is supposed to keep that variable in gradient computation. The variable itself is effectively not used in the computation of A , and so when you call A.backward() , it should not be part of that operation.

I appreciate your help with this approach or if there is a better way to avoid losing the gradient history and still index through a 1D tensor with requires_grad=True !

**Edit (September 15):**

res is a list of zero-dimensional tensors containing squared values of 1 to 5. To concatenate in a single tensor containing [1.0, 4.0, ..., 25.0], I changed return Variable(torch.FloatTensor(res)) to torch.stack(res, dim=0) , which produces tensor([ 1., 4., 9., 16., 25.], grad_fn=<StackBackward>) .

However, I am getting this new error, caused by the A.backward() line.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<project_path>/playground.py", line 22, in <module>
    print(get_grad(x_cloned, x))
  File "<project_path>/playground.py", line 16, in get_grad
    A.backward()
  File "/home/mhy/.local/lib/python3.5/site-packages/torch/tensor.py", line 93, in backward
    torch.autograd.backward(self, gradient, retain_graph, create_graph)
  File "/home/mhy/.local/lib/python3.5/site-packages/torch/autograd/__init__.py", line 84, in backward
    grad_tensors = _make_grads(tensors, grad_tensors)
  File "/home/mhy/.local/lib/python3.5/site-packages/torch/autograd/__init__.py", line 28, in _make_grads
    raise RuntimeError("grad can be implicitly created only for scalar outputs")
RuntimeError: grad can be implicitly created only for scalar outputs

Answer 1

in the basic_fun function, the res variable already is a torch-autograd-Variable you don't need to convert it again. IMHO

def basic_fun(x_cloned):
    res = []
    for i in range(len(x)):
        res.append(x_cloned[i] * x_cloned[i])
    print(res)
    #return Variable(torch.FloatTensor(res))
    return res[0]

def get_grad(inp, grad_var):
    A = basic_fun(inp)
    A.backward()
    return grad_var.grad


x = Variable(torch.FloatTensor([1, 2, 3, 4, 5]), requires_grad=True)
x_cloned = x.clone()
print(get_grad(x_cloned, x))

Answer 2

I changed my basic_fun to the following, which resolved my problem:

def basic_fun(x_cloned):
    res = torch.FloatTensor([0])
    for i in range(len(x)):
        res += x_cloned[i] * x_cloned[i]
    return res

This version returns a scalar value.