I wanted to do SGD but I wasn’t sure if I understood when one should be zeroing out gradients. There are two examples in the tutorials. One zeros before the backward+update pass and the other after the backward+update pass. Are these two the same? What is the difference? code (http://pytorch.org/tutorials/beginner/pytorch_with_examples.html#pytorch-nn):
for t in range(500):
# Forward pass: compute predicted y by passing x to the model.
y_pred = model(x)
# Compute and print loss.
loss = loss_fn(y_pred, y)
print(t, loss.data[0])
# Before the backward pass, use the optimizer object to zero all of the
# gradients for the variables it will update (which are the learnable weights
# of the model)
optimizer.zero_grad()
# Backward pass: compute gradient of the loss with respect to model
# parameters
loss.backward()
# Calling the step function on an Optimizer makes an update to its
# parameters
optimizer.step()
vs (http://pytorch.org/tutorials/beginner/pytorch_with_examples.html):
for t in range(500):
# Forward pass: compute predicted y using operations on Variables; these
# are exactly the same operations we used to compute the forward pass using
# Tensors, but we do not need to keep references to intermediate values since
# we are not implementing the backward pass by hand.
y_pred = x.mm(w1).clamp(min=0).mm(w2)
# Compute and print loss using operations on Variables.
# Now loss is a Variable of shape (1,) and loss.data is a Tensor of shape
# (1,); loss.data[0] is a scalar value holding the loss.
loss = (y_pred - y).pow(2).sum()
print(t, loss.data[0])
# Use autograd to compute the backward pass. This call will compute the
# gradient of loss with respect to all Variables with requires_grad=True.
# After this call w1.grad and w2.grad will be Variables holding the gradient
# of the loss with respect to w1 and w2 respectively.
loss.backward()
# Update weights using gradient descent; w1.data and w2.data are Tensors,
# w1.grad and w2.grad are Variables and w1.grad.data and w2.grad.data are
# Tensors.
w1.data -= learning_rate * w1.grad.data
w2.data -= learning_rate * w2.grad.data
# Manually zero the gradients after updating weights
w1.grad.data.zero_()
w2.grad.data.zero_()
maybe the only time its “wrong” is to zero out after the backward but before the SGD updated?