How does Pytorch's “Fold” and “Unfold” work?

Question

I\'ve gone through the official doc. I\'m having a hard time understanding what this function is used for and how it works. Can someone explain this in Layman terms?

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Answer 1

One dimensional unfolding is easy:

x = torch.arange(1, 9).float()
print(x)
# dimension, size, step
print(x.unfold(0, 2, 1))
print(x.unfold(0, 3, 2))

Out:

tensor([1., 2., 3., 4., 5., 6., 7., 8.])
tensor([[1., 2.],
        [2., 3.],
        [3., 4.],
        [4., 5.],
        [5., 6.],
        [6., 7.],
        [7., 8.]])
tensor([[1., 2., 3.],
        [3., 4., 5.],
        [5., 6., 7.]])

Two dimensional unfolding (also called patching)

import torch
patch=(3,3)
x=torch.arange(16).float()
print(x, x.shape)
x2d = x.reshape(1,1,4,4)
print(x2d, x2d.shape)
h,w = patch
c=x2d.size(1)
print(c) # channels
# unfold(dimension, size, step)
r = x2d.unfold(2,h,1).unfold(3,w,1).transpose(1,3).reshape(-1, c, h, w)
print(r.shape)
print(r) # result

tensor([ 0.,  1.,  2.,  3.,  4.,  5.,  6.,  7.,  8.,  9., 10., 11., 12., 13.,
        14., 15.]) torch.Size([16])
tensor([[[[ 0.,  1.,  2.,  3.],
          [ 4.,  5.,  6.,  7.],
          [ 8.,  9., 10., 11.],
          [12., 13., 14., 15.]]]]) torch.Size([1, 1, 4, 4])
1
torch.Size([4, 1, 3, 3])

tensor([[[[ 0.,  1.,  2.],
          [ 4.,  5.,  6.],
          [ 8.,  9., 10.]]],


        [[[ 4.,  5.,  6.],
          [ 8.,  9., 10.],
          [12., 13., 14.]]],


        [[[ 1.,  2.,  3.],
          [ 5.,  6.,  7.],
          [ 9., 10., 11.]]],


        [[[ 5.,  6.,  7.],
          [ 9., 10., 11.],
          [13., 14., 15.]]]])