Hi Patrick,
The collate function as I propose above does work if you disable memory pinning which is for my application not a bottleneck (assuming that this will be implemented in the future). You do run into different issues if you do this and have multiple workers:

RuntimeError: NYI: Named tensors don’t support serialization. Please drop names via tensor = tensor.rename(None) before serialization.

This is trickier to handle as it is likely somewhere deep in the DataLoader, I will attempt the method of adding names through the dict, will report when and if that works!