class Net(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self):
        super(Net, self).__init__()
        self.conv1 = nn.Conv2d(3, 6, 5)
        self.pool  = nn.MaxPool2d(2,2)
        self.conv2 = nn.Conv2d(6, 16, 5)
        self.fc1   = nn.Linear(16*5*5, 120)
        self.fc2   = nn.Linear(120, 84)
        self.fc3   = nn.Linear(84, 10)

    def forward(self, x):
        x = self.pool(F.relu(self.conv1(x)))
        x = self.pool(F.relu(self.conv2(x)))
        x = x.view(-1, 16*5*5)
        x = F.relu(self.fc1(x))
        x = F.relu(self.fc2(x))
        x = self.fc3(x)
        return x

net = Net()

My confusion is regarding the following line.

x = x.view(-1, 16*5*5)

The view function is meant to reshape the tensor.

Say you have a tensor

import torch
a = torch.range(1, 16)

a is a tensor that has 16 elements from 1 to 16(included). If you want to reshape this tensor to make it a 4 x 4 tensor then you can use

a = a.view(4, 4)

Now a will be a 4 x 4 tensor. Note that after the reshape the total number of elements need to remain the same. Reshaping the tensor a to a 3 x 5 tensor would not be appropriate.

What is the meaning of parameter -1?

If there is any situation that you don't know how many rows you want but are sure of the number of columns, then you can specify this with a -1. (Note that you can extend this to tensors with more dimensions. Only one of the axis value can be -1). This is a way of telling the library: "give me a tensor that has these many columns and you compute the appropriate number of rows that is necessary to make this happen".

This can be seen in the neural network code that you have given above. After the line 

x = self.pool(F.relu(self.conv2(x)))

in the forward function, you will have a 16 depth feature map. You have to flatten this to give it to the fully connected layer. So you tell pytorch to reshape the tensor you obtained to have specific number of columns and tell it to decide the number of rows by itself.

Drawing a similarity between numpy and pytorch, view is similar to numpy's reshape function.

Let's try to understand view by the following examples:

    a=torch.range(1,16)

print(a)

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

print(a.view(-1,2))

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

print(a.view(2,-1,4))   #3d tensor

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

            [[ 9., 10., 11., 12.],
             [13., 14., 15., 16.]]])
print(a.view(2,-1,2))

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

            [[ 9., 10.],
             [11., 12.],
             [13., 14.],
             [15., 16.]]])

print(a.view(4,-1,2))

    tensor([[[ 1.,  2.],
             [ 3.,  4.]],

            [[ 5.,  6.],
             [ 7.,  8.]],

            [[ 9., 10.],
             [11., 12.]],

            [[13., 14.],
             [15., 16.]]])

-1 as an argument value is an easy way to compute the value of say x provided we know values of y, z or the other way round in case of 3d and for 2d again an easy way to compute the value of say x provided we know values of y or vice versa..

I would like to add a small insight to how elements are ordered for .view(...)

• For a Tensor with shape (a,b,c), the order of it's elements are determined by a numbering system: where the first digit has a numbers, second digit has b numbers and third digit has c numbers.
• The mapping of the elements in the new Tensor returned by .view(...) preserves this order of the original Tensor.