RFC: accept Tuple Tangent for arrays?

[mcabbott]

This does this:

julia> ProjectTo([1 2; 3 4])(Tangent{Tuple}(0.1,2,30,400))
2×2 Matrix{Float64}:
 0.1   30.0
 2.0  400.0

julia> ProjectTo([1,2,3,4]')(Tangent{Tuple}(0.1,2,30,400))
ERROR: DimensionMismatch("array with ndims(x) == 1 >  0 cannot have dx::Number")

as a step towards solving this:

julia> Zygote.gradient(x -> +(x...), [1 2; 3 4])[1]
(1, 1, 1, 1)

I'm not entirely sure this should be handled here not in Zygote, what thoughts?

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[oxinabox]

I think i prefer this to be written as:

Suggested change

	function (project::ProjectTo{AbstractArray})(dx::Tangent{<:Any, <:Tuple})
	function (project::ProjectTo{AbstractArray})(dx::Tangent{<:Tuple})

so we don't need to mention how this backed.

[mcabbott]

I think Zygote managed to produce a Tangent{Any, Tuple{...}}, which was why my pirate method specified that, here:

https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl/pull/1044/files#diff-e0bc7da8f1a33a59f5ecfa67257c04038f0b4915b3f74bdf39780818fd0010a2R162

But I was squashing bugs as fast as I could & didn't track it down any further. Can circle back now that things basically pass.

[oxinabox]

right, fair enough.
If we have to do it this way that is also fine.
Maybe just a commond is woth adding to clarify that this is the tangent for something with primal type tangent

Zygote does lose primal type information, that is a thing
We might well be able to teach it a bit more about tuples more easily than the general case.

[mcabbott]

BTW, easy examples of this Tangent{Any} problem:

julia> using Zygote

julia> function Zygote.ChainRulesCore.rrule(::typeof(identity), x::AbstractArray)
         x, dx -> (Zygote.NoTangent(), @show dx)
       end

julia> Zygote.gradient(x -> max(identity(x)...), [1,2,3])
dx = Tangent{Any}(0, 0, 1)
((0, 0, 1),)

julia> Zygote.gradient(x -> sum(identity(x).parent), [1,2,3]')
dx = Tangent{Any}(parent = 3-element Fill{Int64}: entries equal to 1,)
((parent = 3-element Fill{Int64}: entries equal to 1,),)

[oxinabox]

I think I am ok with this.
Sometimes you end up with the wrong kind of iterator.
A common incorrect type of iterator is a tuple.

We might want to demand that it is only going into a AbstractVector.
But that might be too restictive since we might want to do 1 row matrixes etc also?

[mcabbott]

Thanks for thinking. For Zygote at least I do think it wants to allow matrices, which also splat to tuples.

It's possible that this should be (project::ProjectTo{<:AbstractArray})(dx::Tangent{...}) to apply to splatted e.g. row vectors. But this might land us in dispatch hell, and might be best to explore after #430 .

Dispatch hell might be another reason to do this within Zygote rather than here. Diffractor also has difficulty wish splats, but not the same difficulty, so it's not obvious whether this is more widely useful.