wrap_ad causes memory leaks when disabling gradient tracking

[bathal1]

The problem

dr.wrap_ad allows for convenient interoperability between tensor frameworks for derivative tracking, however, it is sometimes useful to call such a wrapped function without tracking derivatives, e.g. in a with dr.suspend_grad(): scope. An example of such a use case could be recomputing the loss value at regular intervals during an optimization for visualization purposes.

Source of the issue

The current implementation always sets the tensor's require_grad to True : https://github.com/mitsuba-renderer/drjit/blob/ebeed9b0c17a641fbeacf0545687ef89d4492308/drjit/router.py#L5827

This causes PyTorch to track derivatives through the computation, but backward is never called, nor can it be since gradient computation is disabled on the DrJIT side. As a consequence, an isolated PyTorch computation graph is stored and never flushed, as _torch.autograd.backward is never called.

This can cause severe leaks when using large computations in PyTorch, e.g. using a deep neural net.

While this could be fixed relatively easily on the user side by providing a flag to the wrapped function to manually disable gradients, this behavior is very error prone. It would be more desirable if we could merely use the grad_enabled flag of each DrJIT variable instead of the current:

https://github.com/mitsuba-renderer/drjit/blob/ebeed9b0c17a641fbeacf0545687ef89d4492308/drjit/router.py#L5755

My understanding is that this is due to forcing detaching all the input parameters when calling the CustomOp.eval to avoid tracking derivatives there: https://github.com/mitsuba-renderer/drjit/blob/ebeed9b0c17a641fbeacf0545687ef89d4492308/drjit/router.py#L5583

One option to alleviate that would be to detach the output of eval, though that may lead to dangling parts of AD graphs being lost because of the computation in eval.

Another option would be to add a function is_grad_suspended to DrJIT, and introduce the following change:

diff --git a/drjit/router.py b/drjit/router.py
index d4cb079..4f4d502 100644
--- a/drjit/router.py
+++ b/drjit/router.py
@@ -5752,7 +5752,7 @@ def wrap_ad(source: str, target: str):
                     return {k: drjit_to_torch(v, enable_grad) for k, v in a.items()}
                 elif _dr.is_array_v(a) and _dr.is_tensor_v(a):
                     b = a.torch()
-                    b.requires_grad = _dr.grad_enabled(a) or (enable_grad and _dr.is_diff_v(a))
+                    b.requires_grad = _dr.grad_enabled(a) or (enable_grad and _dr.is_diff_v(a) and _dr.is_grad_suspended())
                     return b
                 elif _dr.is_diff_v(a) and a.IsFloat:
                     raise TypeError("wrap_ad(): differential input arguments "

Reproducing

The following snippet will print the amount of memory leaked at each step:

import drjit as dr
import torch

cnn = torch.nn.Sequential(
        torch.nn.Conv2d(3, 64, kernel_size=(3, 3), stride=(1, 1), padding=(1, 1)),
        torch.nn.ReLU(inplace=True),
        torch.nn.Conv2d(64, 64, kernel_size=(3, 3), stride=(1, 1), padding=(1, 1)),
        torch.nn.ReLU(inplace=True)
    ).cuda()

for p in cnn.parameters():
    p.requires_grad = False


@dr.wrap_ad(source="drjit", target="torch")
def loss_func(img):
    # Fix: manually disable gradients
    # img.requires_grad = False
    features = cnn(img.T[None, ...])
    x = torch.mean(features)
    return x.cpu()

img = dr.ones(dr.cuda.ad.TensorXf, (256, 256, 3))

losses = []
mem = 0
for i in range(1000):
    tmp = torch.cuda.memory_allocated(device=0)
    print(f"{tmp - mem} bytes leaked")
    mem = tmp
    with dr.suspend_grad():
        loss_clean = loss_func(img)
    losses.append(loss_clean)

[lynshwoo2022]

hi @bathal1 , I encountered some problems : https://github.com/mitsuba-renderer/mitsuba3/issues/467, is this caused by the issue you mentioned?