request for alternative argparse format in sweep

wandb --version && python --version && uname

• Weights and Biases version: wandb, version 0.8.36
• Python version: Python 3.8.2
• Operating System: Darwin

Description

Sweep config file will format the hyperparams into the form of --foo=bar doc here and code responsible.

When using with Facebook’s config library Hydra, this becomes an issue as no argparse is allowed, i.e. no --foo=bar (see here). For instance, when wandb agent runs a command: python train.py --lr=0.02 this breaks the code that uses it; instead it needs the command to be python train.py lr=0.02, then Hydra will pick it up.

Is it possible to allow for usage without the prefix --? This would enable very nice pairing with Hydra to manage complex configurations while still allowing sweep to work. Plus, Hydra is getting quite popular and is used with Ax and PyTorch Lightning.

Thanks.

[vanpelt]

Hey @kengz you can customize how your program is called and optionally omitting arguments. In this examples args is still prepended with “–”, we should expose the ability to change the prefix in this config so I’ll keep this ticket open. In the meantime you can have the sweep execute a wrapper script that modifies the parameters before calling your script:

import sys
import os

args = sys.argv[1:]
bare = [a.replace("--", "") for a in args]
os.system(f"python train.py {' '.join(bare)}")

[raubitsj]

@varun19299 , I am closing this issue, we do have some plans to integrate with other sweep tools in the future. If you want to make a new feature request we can track your request.