What is the upsampling method called 'area' used for?

As jodag said, it is resizing using adaptive average pooling. While the answer at the link aims to explain what adaptive average pooling is, I find the explanation a bit vague.

TL;DR the area mode of torch.nn.functional.interpolate is probably one of the most intuitive ways to think of when one wants to downsample an image. You can think of it as applying an averaging Low-Pass Filter(LPF) to the original image and then sampling. Applying an LPF before sampling is to prevent potential aliasing in the downsampled image. Aliasing can result in Moiré patterns in the downscaled image. It is probably called "area" because it (roughly) preserves the area ratio between the input and output shapes when averaging the input pixels. More specifically, every pixel in the output image will be the average of a respective region in the input image where the 1/area of this region will be roughly the ratio between output image's area and input image's area.

Furthermore, the interpolate function with mode = 'area' calls the source function adaptie_avg_pool2d (implemented in C++) which assigns each pixel in the output tensor the average of all pixel intensities within a computed region of the input. That region is computed per pixel and can vary in size for different pixels. The way it is computed is by multiplying the output pixel's height and width by the ratio between the input and output (in that order) height and width (respectively) and then taking once the floor (for the region's starting index) and once the ceil (for the region's ending index) of the resulting value.

Here's an in-depth analysis of what happens in nn.AdaptiveAvgPool2d:

First of all, as stated there you can find the source code for adaptive average pooling (in C++) here: source Taking a look at the function where the magic happens (or at least the magic on CPU for a single frame), static void adaptive_avg_pool2d_single_out_frame, we have 5 nested loops, running over channel dimension, then width, then height and within the body of the 3rd loop the magic happens:

First compute the region within the input image which is used to calculate the value of the current pixel (recall we had width and height loop to run over all pixels in the output). How is this done?

Using a simple computation of start and end indices for height and width as follows: floor((input_height/output_height) * current_output_pixel_height) for the start and ceil((input_height/output_height) * (current_output_pixel_height+1)) and similarly for the width.

Then, all that is done is to simply average the intensities of all pixels in that region and current channel and place the result in the current output pixel.

I wrote a simple Python snippet that does the same thing, in the same fashion (loops, naive) and produces equivalent results. It takes tensor a and uses adaptive average pool to resize a to shape output_shape in 2 ways - once using the built-in nn.AdaptiveAvgPool2d and once with my translation into Python of the source function in C++: static void adaptive_avg_pool2d_single_out_frame. Built-in function's result is saved into b and my translation is saved into b_hat. You can see that the results are equivalent (you can further play with the spatial shapes and validate this):

import torch
from math import floor, ceil
from torch import nn
a = torch.randn(1, 3, 15, 17)
out_shape = (10, 11)
b = nn.AdaptiveAvgPool2d(out_shape)(a)

b_hat = torch.zeros(b.shape)
for d in range(a.shape[1]):
    for w in range(b_hat.shape[3]):
        for h in range(b_hat.shape[2]):
            startW = floor(w * a.shape[3] / out_shape[1])
            endW = ceil((w + 1) * a.shape[3] / out_shape[1])

            startH = floor(h * a.shape[2] / out_shape[0])
            endH = ceil((h + 1) * a.shape[2] / out_shape[0])
            
            b_hat[0, d, h, w] = torch.mean(a[0, d, startH: endH, startW: endW])

'''
Prints Mean Squared Error =  0 (or a very small number, due to precision error)
as both outputs are the same, proof of output equivalence:
'''
print(nn.MSELoss()(b_hat, b))

Looking at the source code it appears area interpolation is equivalent to resizing a tensor via adaptive average pooling. You can refer to this question for an explanation of adaptive average pooling. Therefore area interpolation is more applicable to downsampling than upsampling.