Passing a numpy array with a single value to wandb.config will convert it to a string

• Weights and Biases version: 0.9.4
• Python version: 3.6.9
• Operating System: Linux

Description

I was trying to pass a numpy array with a single value to wandb.config, and was surprised that it’s automatically converted to a str. However, I am not quite sure whether it’s a bug or not, feel free to close this if it’s intentional.

What I Did

wandb.config.testing = np.array([2. ], dtype=np.float32)
print(wandb.config.testing, type(wandb.config.testing))

will output:

2.0 <class 'str'>

[nate-wandb]

Hi @Al-Murphy, That’s really interesting. I was able to get the same results as you and it was independent of Python version. I’ll let engineering know the bug is related to calling wandb.init()

Thank you for helping trace it to back to the source.

As a work around, NumPy can parse a list of strings to a numpy array of floats so I would recommend calling np.array() if you use the config variable later in your code until we can address the bug.

Thank you again for bringing this to our attention, Nate

[Al-Murphy]

Hey @nate-wandb,

So I’ve noticed some very strange behaviour - on a new, empty notebook the array isn’t converted to a str:

[2.] <class 'numpy.ndarray'>
0.12.9
3.9.7 (default, Sep 16 2021, 13:09:58) 
[GCC 7.5.0]

And also on my current notebook, if I restart the kernel and run just the lines you sent me, again there is no issue. Only when I run my actual code first does an issue appear that it’s converted to a str. I then found what’s causing the issue through process of elimination and it turns out its:

wandb.init(
    name='test1',
    entity="al-murphy",
    project="test",
)

Once I run this and the commands you posted (on either notebook), I get the following:

2.0 <class 'str'>
0.12.9
3.9.7 (default, Sep 16 2021, 13:09:58) 
[GCC 7.5.0]

Are you aware of this causing an issue? Just to note when I run the wandb.init I do get the following warning:

Failed to detect the name of this notebook, you can set it manually with the WANDB_NOTEBOOK_NAME environment variable to enable code saving.
wandb: Currently logged in as: al-murphy (use `wandb login --relogin` to force relogin)
/rds/general/user/aemurphy/home/anaconda3/envs/py_analysis/lib/python3.9/site-packages/IPython/html.py:12: ShimWarning: The `IPython.html` package has been deprecated since IPython 4.0. You should import from `notebook` instead. `IPython.html.widgets` has moved to `ipywidgets`.
  warn("The `IPython.html` package has been deprecated since IPython 4.0. "