objax.variable.VarCollection.update fails when passing Dict[str, Any]

[alvarobartt]

Hi everyone! Thanks for the awesome work with objax and the JAX environment, and happy holidays!

I was playing around for objax for a bit, and realized that if you try to update the model.vars() which is a VarCollection using the VarCollection.update method overwriting the default dict.update method, if what you pass to the function is a Python dictionary and not a VarCollection it fails, as it's being cast into a Python list, and then we're trying to loop over the items of a list as if it was a Python dictionary, so it throws a ValueError: too many values to unpack (expected 2).

objax/objax/variable.py

Lines 311 to 318 in 53b391b

	def update(self, other: Union['VarCollection', Iterable[Tuple[str, BaseVar]]]):
	"""Overload dict.update method to catch potential conflicts during assignment."""
	if not isinstance(other, self.__class__):
	other = list(other)
	else:
	other = other.items()
	conflicts = set()
	for k, v in other:

Is this intended? Shouldn't VarCollection.update just loop over classes that allow .items()?

[alvarobartt]

Hi @AlexeyKurakin (sorry for mentioning you here in case you're not actively working on this), can you confirm whether the expected behavior of .update is to also allow VarCollection, because according to the typing of the .update function it is, I can work on this issue as well as the referenced one if you want 😄 Thanks!