I know how to select which of the tf.Variables I create are subject to training: I call the optimizer with var_list=[]. My problem arises when I don't actually create the variables myself, and thus can't pass them explicitly to the optimizwer. Variables to be optimized are being created for me with the convenience function for a convolution: it will create Weight and Bias Variables and then add these to the trainable_variables() list. I know how to select which of the tf.Variables