Differentiable indexing with float tensors

Hey,

Is there any way to index a tensor with float tensors and still keeping these tensors differentiable?
For example, I have a tensor of shape (3, 400, 400) which stands for an RGB image.
I want to “draw” a square in the image within some boundaries.
So there’s the code:
img = torch.full((3, img_size, img_size), dtype=torch.float32, fill_value=1)
And I have 2 float tensors representing the center of the square and a fixed width.
x_center = torch.rand(1, requires_grad=True)
y_center = torch.rand(1, requires_grad=True)
And I have a representation of the square left upper corner and right lower corner:
x1 = (x_center - (width/2))*img_size
x2 = (x_center + (width/2))*img_size
y1 = (y_center - (width/2))*img_size
y2 = (y_center + (width/2))*img_size

So finally I want to do this:
img[: x1:x2, y1:y2] = some_value

which of course cannot be done since these indices are floats and not longs. for example:
x1 = ((x_center - (width/2))*img_size).long()

converting these parameters to long does not keep the computation graph of x_center and y_center.

Is there any way to do this so when I call the backward function x_center and y_center grads will be updated?

Thanks!

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Hi,

The only way I can think of is to use affine_grid and grid_sample (doc here) that are used by the Transformer layers.

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Can you please show an example? I’ve read so much about these functions and I don’t have any idea how to do it.

Hi,

You can find an example here: Gradient zero for one parameter in custom model resulting in no update