Hi Everyone -
Is there a way to shuffle/randomize a tensor. Something equivalent to numpy’s random.shuffle.
Thanks!
3 Likes
Just index with a tensor of random indices.
5 Likes
You could use torch.randperm to create random indices and then index it using @asml’s suggestion.
11 Likes
@asml , @ptrbick - thanks both. is something like this
t=torch.tensor([[1,2],[3,4]])
r=torch.randperm(2)
c=torch.randperm(2)
t=t[r][:,c]
The most elegant solution? Its simple enough but the indexing in t[r][:,c] feels a bit odd
9 Likes
You could merge the indexing or use view instead:
t=torch.tensor([[1,2],[3,4]])
r=torch.randperm(2)
c=torch.randperm(2)
t=t[r[:, None], c]
# With view
idx = torch.randperm(t.nelement())
t = t.view(-1)[idx].view(t.size())
20 Likes
Oh smart – I like the .view() solution, especially since nbelement and size are fixed. The merged-indexing is nice but probably no less awkward than my first go.
Thanks again!
Don’t do this, it is not a real random transformation!
indeed:
The number of possible transformations for a N x N square matrix: (N*N)!
Or, with two permutations of the lines and the columns as you do, there are (N!)*(N!) possible transformation
And (N*N)! is far higher than (N!)*(N!) when N is high…
with you code, the matrix
t=torch.tensor([[1,2],[3,4]])
will never be randomized into
t=torch.tensor([[1,4],[2,3]])
Use the code of @ptrblck with the view, it is a good one 
6 Likes
Hello,
If we want to shuffle the order of image database (format: [batch_size, channels, height, width]), I think this is a good method:
t = torch.rand(4, 2, 3, 3)
idx = torch.randperm(t.shape[0])
t = t[idx].view(t.size())
t[idx] will retain the structure of channels, height, and width, while shuffling the order of the image.
8 Likes
Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks, mate!
This code works, but the result changes at every run. How can I make it deterministic?
1 Like
Seed the pseudorandom number generator via torch.manual_seed(SEED) before using the random operation.
1 Like
If it’s on CPU then the simplest way seems to be just converting the tensor to numpy array and use in place shuffling :
t = torch.arange(5)
np.random.shuffle(t.numpy())
print(t)
# tensor([0, 2, 3, 1, 4])
For numpy parity, it would be handy to have torch.shuffle()
For batch-first shuffling:
tzr = torch.tensor([
[[1],[1],[1]],
[[2],[2],[2]],
[[3],[3],[3]],
[[4],[4],[4]],
])
rand_indx = torch.randperm(len(tzr))
tzr[rand_indx]
returns
tensor([
[[3], [3], [3]],
[[4], [4], [4]],
[[2], [2], [2]],
[[1], [1], [1]]
])