An Underrated Technique to Define More Elegant Python Classes
Ever wondered why we never explicitly invoke the forward() method in PyTorch?
A Python class always defines some methods in a class that an object can invoke.
For instance, consider we want to evaluate the following quadratic:
One way is to define a method that accepts the input and returns the value of the quadratic, as shown below:
Of course, there is nothing wrong with this approach.
But there is one smart and elegant way of doing this in Python.
Instead of explicitly invoking a method, we can define the __call__() magic method.
This magic method allows you to define the behavior of the class object when it is invoked like a function (like this: object()).
Let’s rename the evaluate() method to __call__().
As a result, we can now invoke the class object directly instead of invoking a method explicitly.
This can have many advantages. For instance:
It allows us to implement objects that can be used in a flexible and intuitive way.
It allows us to use a class object in contexts where a callable object is expected — using a class as a decorator, for instance.
In fact, unknown to many, this happens all the time when we build deep learning models with PyTorch.
For instance, consider this simple PyTorch class:
Here, the forward() method defines the forward pass of the model.
Now tell me something.
When was the last time you explicitly invoked the model.forward() method to run the forward pass?
I am sure you would have never done that.
Instead, PyTorch users always write just model() to run the forward pass as if the model object was a Python function:
But the variable model is a class object, right? It is not a function. This can be verified below:
Then how are we able to invoke it like a function — model()?
As you may have already guessed, this becomes possible because all PyTorch classes implicitly declare the __call__() method themselves.
Within that __call__() method, they invoke the user-defined forward pass.
A simplified version of this is depicted below:
PyTorch itself adds the
__call__()method.The
__call__()method invokes the user-definedforward()method.
This way, Python gets to know that the model object can be invoked like a function — model().
In fact, we can verify that we will get the same output no matter which way we run the forward pass:
Cool Pythonistic stuff, isn’t it?
These things revolve around good and elegant object-oriented programming practices.
We covered such advanced OOP stuff in detail in a recent deep dive here if you wish to level up your OOP skills: Object-Oriented Programming with Python for Data Scientists.
👉 Over to you: What are some other cool Python OOP tricks?
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