Confused about forward function of custom layer

autograd
1

This is code snippet from PyTorch tutorial.

# Residual block
class ResidualBlock(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, in_channels, out_channels, stride=1, downsample=None):
        super(ResidualBlock, self).__init__()
        self.conv1 = conv3x3(in_channels, out_channels, stride)
        self.bn1 = nn.BatchNorm2d(out_channels)
        self.relu = nn.ReLU(inplace=True)
        self.conv2 = conv3x3(out_channels, out_channels)
        self.bn2 = nn.BatchNorm2d(out_channels)
        self.downsample = downsample
        
    def forward(self, x):
        residual = x
        out = self.conv1(x)
        out = self.bn1(out)
        out = self.relu(out)
        out = self.conv2(out)
        out = self.bn2(out)
        if self.downsample:
            residual = self.downsample(x)
        out += residual
        out = self.relu(out)
        return out

out overwrites the previous out. Then how can the gradients successfully back-propagate?

2

out contains a list of layers it passed through the feed-forward process, every time you do out = layer(out), the layer is added to the list. Once you back-propagate it goes through the list from the last to the first on the list.