Understanding pytorch

1

Hi, I am new to pytorch and trying to understand the pytorch tutorial. https://pytorch.org/tutorials/beginner/blitz/neural_networks_tutorial.html#sphx-glr-beginner-blitz-neural-networks-tutorial-py

I dont understand how an object’s variable can accept arguments or act as a function as given in x = F.max_pool2d(F.relu(self.conv1(x)), (2, 2)) where ‘self.conv1(x)’ is acting as a function?

class Net(nn.Module):

def __init__(self):
    super(Net, self).__init__()
    # 1 input image channel, 6 output channels, 5x5 square convolution
    # kernel
    self.conv1 = nn.Conv2d(1, 6, 5)
    self.conv2 = nn.Conv2d(6, 16, 5)
    # an affine operation: y = Wx + b
    self.fc1 = nn.Linear(16 * 5 * 5, 120)
    self.fc2 = nn.Linear(120, 84)
    self.fc3 = nn.Linear(84, 10)

def forward(self, x):
    # Max pooling over a (2, 2) window
    x = F.max_pool2d(F.relu(self.conv1(x)), (2, 2))
    # If the size is a square you can only specify a single number
    x = F.max_pool2d(F.relu(self.conv2(x)), 2)
    x = x.view(-1, self.num_flat_features(x))
    x = F.relu(self.fc1(x))
    x = F.relu(self.fc2(x))
    x = self.fc3(x)
    return x

def num_flat_features(self, x):
    size = x.size()[1:]  # all dimensions except the batch dimension
    num_features = 1
    for s in size:
        num_features *= s
    return num_features

net = Net()
print(net)

2

Each module derives from nn.Module, while implements the __call__ function. This function is called, when you can directly an object e.g. as model(x).
You can see in the linked source code that some maintenance will be performed (e.g. hooks will be called) and finally forward will be executed, which defines the actual forward pass of this module.

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