order of imports matters?

[humnaawan]

Hello, it seems I get an error if I import anything from sbi.neural_nets without importing something else first. I discovered this when I attempted to just import posterior_nn via from sbi.neural_nets import posterior_nn and I got

ImportError: cannot import name 'classifier_nn' from partially initialized module 'sbi.neural_nets.factory' (most likely due to a circular import) (../lib/python3.9/site-packages/sbi/neural_nets/factory.py)

Same thing happens if I just do import sbi.neural_nets or from sbi.neural_nets.embedding_nets import FCEmbedding

The error goes away if I import other things first, e.g.,
from sbi.analysis import pairplot
from sbi.inference import NPE, simulate_for_sbi
from sbi.utils import BoxUniform
from sbi.diagnostics import check_sbc, run_sbc, check_tarp, run_tarp

It took me a while to debug this so I thought I'd report it here.

[janfb]

Yes, unfortunately we still have a circular import problem here, see #1249 for more details.

[manuelgloeckler]

The issue is fixed on the current main and most recent release, 0.23.3.

However, there are still some circular imports. I did improve our tests on circular imports to detect these kind of errors and try to resolve them in #1357.