Arrays in JAX are strictly immutable, meaning their elements cannot be modified in-place via direct assignment. Instead, JAX provides index update operators, such as .at[].set(), which perform the requested modifications by creating and returning a completely new array populated with the updated values.

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Specific elements or contiguous ranges within a tensor can be modified in-place by specifying their indices and assigning new values. By positioning indexing or slicing operations on the left-hand side of an assignment operator, data can be written directly to those specific locations within the tensor.

Tensor Element Assignment

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In TensorFlow, standard Tensors are immutable data structures and do not support direct element assignment. To maintain mutable state that allows for index-based updates, elements must be stored within a Variable. However, it is important to note that gradients do not flow backwards through assignments made to a Variable.

TensorFlow Tensor Immutability

JAX Array Immutability

To prevent unnecessary memory allocations, the results of an operation can be assigned to a previously allocated tensor using slice notation. For example, if a tensor `Z` is initialized to have the same shape as `Y` using `zeros_like`, executing `Z[:] = X + Y` overwrites the existing values of `Z` with the newly computed elements. This ensures the update occurs in-place, keeping the memory address of `Z` unchanged.

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