Hashable args/kwargs

1

Hello.

I’m new to pyro, so my questions may seem kind of basic. But I’m running into a bug in my program where the marginal distribution I’ve inferred from a generative model seems to need hashable arguments. Does this mean that if we specify a generative model it can’t take as arguments anything hashable (i.e. numpy arrays? other types of objects?).

Another quick question, what’s the significance of the *args, **kwargs notation I see in the call structure for a bunch of the functions in the documentation?

Thanks for your help!

2

Hi, can you post a code snippet that reproduces the errors you’re getting?

The *args, **kwargs notation indicates additional, unspecified arguments. It appears frequently because much of Pyro’s internals are concerned with recording and modifying the behavior of function calls.

3

Sure! The code is dependent on a bunch of procedures in other files, but I can show you the part that is producing the error:

def solve(h, num_samp, bmdp, belief, state):
	action_dist = dist.Categorical(ps=Variable(torch.FloatTensor([1/len(bmdp.pomdp.actions) for _ in bmdp.pomdp.actions])),vs=list(range(len(bmdp.pomdp.actions))))
	qs = [bmdp.reward_func(belief, a) for a in bmdp.pomdp.actions]

for i in range(len(qs)):
	marg = pyro.infer.Marginal(pyro.infer.Importance(sample_reward, num_samples=num_samp))
	exp_val = 1/num_samp*sum([marg(h-1,bmdp,belief,action_dist,state) for _ in range(num_samp)])
	qs[i] += exp_val

print('qs')
print(qs)
print()
return qs[np.argmax(np.array([q[1] for q in qs]))][0]

The above call on marg leads to the issue. Also for reference here is the sample_reward function:

def sample_reward(h, bmdp, belief, action_dist, state):
	if h == 0:
		return 0
	else:
		act_ind = pyro.sample('act', action_dist)[0]
		# print(act_ind)
		act = bmdp.pomdp.actions[act_ind]
		new_bel, state = bmdp.bel_sampler(belief, act, state)
		return bmdp.reward_func(belief, act) + (bmdp.pomdp.disc*sample_reward(h-1,bmdp,new_bel,action_dist,state) if state != 'complete' else 0)

Thanks for your help!

I’m not sure why the formatting messed up my indentation is solve. I have the proper indents in my actual code

So one thing I noticed after some investigation is that the marginal seems to want Torch Variable(FloatTensors()) as input. In fact I can’t seem to get these programs to run otherwise. Does everything that I pass to the marginal have to be a Variable wrapping a Tensor? Because I could make that edit but it would require some substantial re-structuring of previous code. I want to be sure that that is necessary before diving in. Also how should I wrap things that aren’t floats, ints, and arrays i.e. objects?