Hi, I used a pre-trained VGG network as a feature extractor and compute L1Loss between VGG features of two images. Before, i implement this by zero gradients of VGG each time.
But today, I saw an implementation which set require_gradients= False . I am curious that if require_dradient is False, how do the gradients backpropagate to the network before VGG?  Is gradients of VGG being zeroed after each backpropagation?
Here are the part of the codes.
class Vgg19(torch.nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, requires_grad=False):
        super(Vgg19, self).__init__()
        vgg_pretrained_features = models.vgg19(pretrained=True).features
        self.slice1 = torch.nn.Sequential()
        self.slice2 = torch.nn.Sequential()
        self.slice3 = torch.nn.Sequential()
        self.slice4 = torch.nn.Sequential()
        self.slice5 = torch.nn.Sequential()
        for x in range(2):
            self.slice1.add_module(str(x), vgg_pretrained_features[x])
        for x in range(2, 7):
            self.slice2.add_module(str(x), vgg_pretrained_features[x])
        for x in range(7, 12):
            self.slice3.add_module(str(x), vgg_pretrained_features[x])
        for x in range(12, 21):
            self.slice4.add_module(str(x), vgg_pretrained_features[x])
        for x in range(21, 30):
            self.slice5.add_module(str(x), vgg_pretrained_features[x])
        if not requires_grad:
            for param in self.parameters():
                param.requires_grad = False

    def forward(self, X):
        h_relu1 = self.slice1(X)
        h_relu2 = self.slice2(h_relu1)        
        h_relu3 = self.slice3(h_relu2)        
        h_relu4 = self.slice4(h_relu3)        
        h_relu5 = self.slice5(h_relu4)                
        out = [h_relu1, h_relu2, h_relu3, h_relu4, h_relu5]
        return out


class VGGLoss(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, gpu_ids):
        super(VGGLoss, self).__init__()        
        self.vgg = Vgg19().cuda()
        self.criterion = nn.L1Loss()
        self.weights = [1.0/32, 1.0/16, 1.0/8, 1.0/4, 1.0]        

    def forward(self, x, y):              
        x_vgg, y_vgg = self.vgg(x), self.vgg(y)
        loss = 0
        for i in range(len(x_vgg)):
            loss += self.weights[i] * self.criterion(x_vgg[i], y_vgg[i].detach())        
        return loss