PyTorch Developer Podcast Edward Yang, Team PyTorch

What’s a learning rate? Why might you want to schedule it? How does the LR scheduler API in PyTorch work? What the heck is up with the formula implementation? Why is everything terrible?

What are they good for? (Caches. Private fields.) C++ side support, how it’s implemented / release resources. Python side support, how it’s implemented. Weak ref tensor hazard due to resurrection. Downsides of weak references in C++. Scott Wolchok’s release resources optimization.

Mike Ruberry has an RFC about stride-agnostic operator semantics (https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/78050), so let's talk about strides. What are they? How are they used to implement views and memory format? How do you handle them properly when writing kernels? In what sense are strides overspecified, and therefore, not worth slavishly reimplementing in a system like PrimTorch? What does Edward think we should do about them?

My blog post that covers strides along with other topics can be found at http://blog.ezyang.com/2019/05/pytorch-internals/

AOTAutograd is a cool new feature in functorch for capturing both forward and backward traces of PyTorch operators, letting you run them through a compiler and then drop the compiled kernels back into a normal PyTorch eager program. Today, Horace joins me to tell me how it works, what it is good to use for, and what our future plans for it are.

Sherlock recently joined the PyTorch team, having previously worked on ONNX Runtime at Microsoft, and Sherlock’s going to ask me some questions about the dispatcher, and I’m going to answer them. We talked about the history of the dispatcher, how to override dispatching order, multiple dispatch, how to organize various dispatch keys and torch function mode. The companion video is at https://youtu.be/_qB2Ho1O3u4

PyTorch recently moved all of its CI from CircleCI to GitHub Actions. There were a lot of improvements in the process, making my old podcast about CI obsolete! Today, Eli Uriegas joins me to talk about why we moved to GitHub Actions, how the new CI system is put together, and what some cool features about our new CI.