Calculating loss with autograd: One of the differentiated Tensors appears to not have been used in the graph

1

I have a convolutional neural network that predicts 3 quantities: Ux, Uy, and P. They are all 2D arrays of size [100,60], and my batch size is 10.

I want to compute the loss and update the network by calculating the CURL of the predicted velocity with the CURL of the target velocity. I have a function that does this: discrete_curl, and it computes it using (Ux_pred, Uy_pred), the predicted Ux and Uy. I want to compute the loss by comparing it to ground truth targets that I have: true_curl = curl(Ux_true, Uy_true)

To do this, I need to compute the curl loss in terms of Ux and Uy. I have not gotten past this error in Pytorch. this is my code so far:

# Curl function defined seperately
def discrete_curl(self,x,y,curl):
        for m in range(100):
            for n in range(60):
                if n <= 58:
                    if m <= 98:
                        if x[m,n] != 0 and y[m,n] != 0:
                            curl[m,n] = ((y[m+1,n] - y[m-1,n]) / 2*1) - ((x[m,n+1] - x[m,n-1]) / 2*1)
        return curl

Code:

        inputs= torch.from_numpy(x) 
        targets= torch.from_numpy(y[:,0:3,:,:])  # Ux,Uy,P target

        pred = self.forward(inputs)
        pred_ux = pred[:,0,:,:]  #Ux of batch: size [10,100,60]
        pred_uy = pred[:,1,:,:]. #Uy of batch: size [10,100,60]
        
        predicted_curl = np.zeros((len(pred),100,60), dtype=float)
        predicted_curl = torch.from_numpy(predicted_curl)
        for i in range(len(pred)):

            pred_ux[i] = Variable(pred_ux[i], requires_grad=True) #Ux_pred
            pred_uy[i] = Variable(pred_uy[i], requires_grad=True) #Uy_pred

            predicted_curl[i] = Variable(predicted_curl[i], requires_grad=True) #curl from predicted velocity values, to be updated with curl function below
            predicted_curl[i] = self.discrete_curl(pred_ux[i], pred_uy[i], predicted_curl[i])
            grad_tensor = torch.autograd.grad(outputs=predicted_curl[i], inputs=(pred_ux[i], pred_uy[i]), grad_outputs=torch.ones_like(new_arr[i]), retain_graph=True)
            print(grad_tensor)

However, it fails when I try to define grad_tensor, before I can even compute the loss. It fails with this error:

    grad_tensor = torch.autograd.grad(outputs=new_arr[i], inputs=(pred_ux[i], pred_uy[i]), grad_outputs=torch.ones_like(new_arr[i]), retain_graph=True)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.6/lib/python3.6/site-packages/torch/autograd/__init__.py", line 204, in grad
    inputs, allow_unused)
RuntimeError: One of the differentiated Tensors appears to not have been used in the graph. Set allow_unused=True if this is the desired behavior.

How do I get past this?

2

Really stuck on this, anything can help!

3

Have you tried to add allow_unused=True in torch.autograd? If you enable it the gradients would be None for the unused variables and then you can look at which variable’s gradients were None and then set that variable’s requires_grad=False or you can set the gradient of all variables with None gradient equal to 0, as you do not need to learn these things.

4

I haven’t tried that, I’m not sure what it means because the variables should be used.

5

The error means not all the tensors for which requires_grad=True are used in gradient computation. An example of this would be

a = torch.randn(3, 4, requires_grad=True)
b = torch.randn(3, 4, requires_grad=True)
loss = a.sum()
torch.autograd.grad(loss, (a,b))

So try setting allow_unused=True and it should work.