Backpropagation with requires_grad=False

autograd
1

This is just to confirm my understanding on how autograd works, as I found the solution neither here nor here.

In the following setup m1, m2 and m3 are Pytorch Sequential models, l1 is a loss function, lab are labels. Parts of m2 have requires_grad=False:

input = torch.randn(10)
o1 = m1(input)
o2 = m2(o1)
o3 = m3(o2)
l=l1(o3,lab)
l.backward()

My question is: since part (or even all) of m2 do not compute gradients, will the gradients be automatically copied from m3 to m1 automatically by backward, or I have to do it outside of it?

1 Like
2

Autograd won’t copy the gradients, but will properly backpropagate through all models up to the first parameter, which requires gradients.
E.g. you could also freeze all models and set requires_grad=True for the input and will still get valid gradients for the input tensor.
The frozen parameters won’t get their .grad attribute populated.

3

Thanks. By ‘freeze’, do you mean requires_grad_(False)?

4

Yes, that’s what I meant. :slight_smile: