Can't apply gradients on tf.Variable - tensorflow

Question

I am trying to learn a similarity matrix(M) between two image embeddings, A single instance of training is a pair of images - (anchor, positive). So ideally the model will return 0 distance for embeddings of similar images.
The problem is, when i declare the distance matrix(M) as a tf.Variable, it returns an error
on this line
self.optimizer.apply_gradients(zip(gradients, self.trainable_variables))
TypeError: 'Variable' object is not iterable.
I think I should use a tensorflow datatype for M, that is iterable
Please tell me how I can fix this issue
import tensorflow as tf
from tensorflow import keras
# metric learning model
class MetricLearningModel:
def __init__(self, lr):
self.optimizer = keras.optimizers.Adam(lr=lr)
self.lr = lr
self.loss_object = keras.losses.MeanSquaredError()
self.trainable_variables = tf.Variable(
(tf.ones((2048, 2048), dtype=tf.float32)),
trainable=True
)
def similarity_function(self, anchor_embeddings, positive_embeddings):
M = self.trainable_variables
X_i = anchor_embeddings
X_j = positive_embeddings
similarity_value = tf.matmul(X_j, M, name='Tensor')
similarity_value = tf.matmul(similarity_value, tf.transpose(X_i), name='Tensor')
# distance(x,y) = sqrt( (x-y)#M#(x-y).T )
return similarity_value
def train_step(self, anchor, positive):
anchor_embeddings, positive_embeddings = anchor, positive
# Calculate gradients
with tf.GradientTape() as tape:
# Calculate similarity between anchors and positives.
similarities = self.similarity_function(anchor_embeddings, positive_embeddings)
y_pred = similarities
y_true = tf.zeros(1)
print(y_true, y_pred)
loss_value = self.loss_object(
y_pred=y_true,
y_true=y_pred,
)
gradients = tape.gradient(loss_value, self.trainable_variables)
# Apply gradients via optimizer
self.optimizer.apply_gradients(zip(gradients, self.trainable_variables))
metric_model = MetricLearningModel(lr=1e-3)
anchor, positive = tf.ones((1, 2048), dtype=tf.float32), tf.ones((1, 2048), dtype=tf.float32)
metric_model.train_step(anchor, positive)

Answer 1

The python zip function expects iterable objects, like for example a list or a tuple.
In your calls to tape.gradient, or optimizer.apply_gradients, you can put your Variable in a list to solve the issue :
with tf.GradienTape() as tape:
gradients = tape.gradient(loss_value, [self.trainable_variables])
# Apply gradients via optimizer
self.optimizer.apply_gradients(zip(gradients, [self.trainable_variables]))
tape.gradient respects the shape of the sources object passed to compute the gradients of, so if you feed it with a list, you will get a list out of it. It is stated in the documentation:
Returns
a list or nested structure of Tensors (or IndexedSlices, or None), one for each element in sources. Returned structure is the same as the structure of sources.