Good to know

We try to make BackPACK easy to use, but some conventions differ from standard PyTorch and can be a bit obscure. Here are some common pitfalls and recommendations.

Check that BackPACK does what you think it should do

Most of the quantities provided by BackPACK can also be computed with the standard automatic differentiation in PyTorch, although not efficiently. For example, the individual gradients given by BatchGrad can be computed by doing a for loop over each example, and doing a forward and a backward pass over each sample individually. This is slow, but can be used to check that the values returned by BackPACK match what you expect them to be.

While we test many use-cases and try to write solid code, unexpected behavior (such as some listed on this page) or bugs are not impossible. We recommend that you check that the outputs match your expectations, especially if you’re using non-default values on slightly more unusual parameters like groups for convolutions or pooling operators. BackPACK will try to raise warnings if you use modules or parameters in obvious unsupported ways, but it can’t anticipate everything.

Aggregating quantities and zero_grad()

When computing multiple gradients, one after the other, PyTorch accumulates all the gradients seen so far in the .grad field by summing the result of each .backward() call. To compute a new gradient, it is standard practice to call zero_grad() on the model or optimizer to reset the accumulation. This means that to compute the gradient of a sum, you can compute one element of the sum, do a .backward(), and iterate through the next one, and .grad will hold the sum of the gradient (which is also the gradient of the sum).

Because the quantities returned by BackPACK are not necessarily additive (the variance over two batches is not the sum of the variance on each batch), BackPACK does not aggregate like PyTorch. Every call to .backward(), inside a with backpack(...):, reset the corresponding field, and the fields returned by BackPACK are not affected by zero_grad().

extend-ing for first and second-order extension

The intro example shows how to make a model using a torch.nn.Sequential module and how to extend() the model and the loss function. But extending everything is only really necessary for Second order quantities. For those, BackPACK needs to know about the structure of the whole network to backpropagate additional information.

Because First order extensions don’t backpropagate additional information, they are more flexible and only require every parameterized torch.nn.Module be extended. For any unparameterized operation, you can use standard operations from the torch.nn.functional module or standard tensor operations.

Not (yet) supported models

We’re working on handling more complex computation graphs, as well as adding more layers. Along those lines, some things that will (most likely) not work with BackPACK are:

• Reusing the same parameters multiple times in the computation graph: This sadly means that BackPACK can’t compute the individual gradients or second-order information of an L2-regularized loss or architectures that use parameters multiple times.

• Some exotic hyperparameters are not fully supported: Feature requests on the repository are welcome.