Advance indexing of tensor to get rid of nested for-loops

nlp
1

I have a situation for which I am using nested for-loops, but I want to know if there’s a faster way of doing this using some advanced indexing in Pytorch.

I have a tensor named t:

t = torch.randn(3,8)
print(t)
tensor([[-1.1258, -1.1524, -0.2506, -0.4339,  0.8487,  0.6920, -0.3160, -2.1152],
        [ 0.4681, -0.1577,  1.4437,  0.2660,  0.1665,  0.8744, -0.1435, -0.1116],
        [ 0.9318,  1.2590,  2.0050,  0.0537,  0.6181, -0.4128, -0.8411, -2.3160]])

I want to create a new tensor which indexes values from t.
Let’s say these indexes are stored in variable indexes

indexes = [[(0, 1, 4, 5), (0, 1, 6, 7), (4, 5, 6, 7)],
           [(2, 3, 4, 5)],
           [(4, 5, 6, 7), (2, 3, 6, 7)]]

Each inner tuple in indexes represents four indexes that are to be taken from a row in t.

As an example, based on these indexes my output would be a 6x4 dimension tensor (6 is the total number of tuples in indexes, and 4 corresponds to one value in a tuple)

For instance, this is what I want to do:

#counting the number of tuples in indexes
count_instances = sum([1 for lst in indexes for tupl in lst])

#creating a zero output matrix 
final_tensor = torch.zeros(count_instances,4)

final_tensor[0] = t[0,indexes[0][0]]
final_tensor[1] = t[0,indexes[0][1]]
final_tensor[2] = t[0,indexes[0][2]]
final_tensor[3] = t[1,indexes[1][0]]
final_tensor[4] = t[2,indexes[2][0]]
final_tensor[5] = t[2,indexes[2][1]]

The final output looks like this:
print(final_tensor)

tensor([[-1.1258, -1.1524,  0.8487,  0.6920],
        [-1.1258, -1.1524, -0.3160, -2.1152],
        [ 0.8487,  0.6920, -0.3160, -2.1152],
        [ 1.4437,  0.2660,  0.1665,  0.8744],
        [ 0.6181, -0.4128, -0.8411, -2.3160],
        [ 2.0050,  0.0537, -0.8411, -2.3160]])

I created a function build_tensor (shown below) to achieve this with nested for-loops, but I want to know if there’s a faster way of doing it with simple indexing in Pytorch. I want a faster way of doing it because I’m doing this operation hundreds of times with bigger index and t sizes.

Any help?

def build_tensor(indexes, t):
    #count tuples
    count_instances = sum([1 for lst in indexes for tupl in lst])
    #create a zero tensor
    final_tensor = torch.zeros(count_instances,4)
    final_tensor_idx = 0

    for curr_idx, lst in enumerate(indexes):
        for tupl in lst:
            final_tensor[final_tensor_idx] = t[curr_idx,tupl]
            final_tensor_idx+=1
    return final_tensor
2

Have you tried index_select ? It’s an easy way to select parts of tensor along one dimension by the indexes, so one for loop can be replaced.