You don’t “tell” itself. I assume optimizer simply iterates over those parameters. Any model parameter will have the attribute .grad (and any tensor). So you can always agnostically iterate over passed modules and tensors and upgrading with the corresponding gradient.
Just look at source code
        Arguments:
            closure (callable, optional): A closure that reevaluates the model
                and returns the loss.
        """
        loss = None
        if closure is not None:
            loss = closure()

        for group in self.param_groups:
            weight_decay = group['weight_decay']
            momentum = group['momentum']
            dampening = group['dampening']
            nesterov = group['nesterov']

            for p in group['params']:
                if p.grad is None:
                    continue
                d_p = p.grad.data
                if weight_decay != 0:
                    d_p.add_(weight_decay, p.data)
                if momentum != 0:
                    param_state = self.state[p]
                    if 'momentum_buffer' not in param_state:
                        buf = param_state['momentum_buffer'] = torch.clone(d_p).detach()
                    else:
                        buf = param_state['momentum_buffer']
                        buf.mul_(momentum).add_(1 - dampening, d_p)
                    if nesterov:
                        d_p = d_p.add(momentum, buf)
                    else:
                        d_p = buf

                p.data.add_(-group['lr'], d_p)

        return loss