sweep: Parameter value written w/ scientific notation gets converted to str?

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

• Weights and Biases version: wandb, version 0.9.1
• Python version: Python 3.6.9
• Operating System: Linux (Ubuntu 18.04)

Description

I get the following error when attempting to launch a local sweep:

$ wandb sweep --controller ./sweep.yaml
...
  File ".../lib/python3.6/site-packages/wandb/sweeps/params.py", line
 118, in __init__
    if self.min >= self.max:
TypeError: '>=' not supported between instances of 'str' and 'float'

What I Did

I wrote a sweep.yaml file, following the documentation: https://docs.wandb.com/sweeps/configuration#parameters

I launched as described above, but got the above error. When editing the code, I found that one of the parameters was getting converted to a string.

Reproduction:

( set -eux;
cd $(mktemp -d)

python3 -m venv .
source ./bin/activate

cat > requirements.txt <<'EOF'
wandb==0.10.18
numpy==1.19.0
scipy==1.5.0
EOF

pip install -r ./requirements.txt

cat > ./script.py <<'EOF'
import os
import wandb

def main():
    os.environ["WANDB_MODE"] = "dryrun"
    config = dict(
        lr=1e-4,
    )
    wandb.init(
        config=config,
    )
    print(wandb.config)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()
EOF

cat > ./sweep.yaml <<'EOF'
program: ./script.py

controller:
  type: local

method: bayes
metric:
  name: loss/train
  goal: minimize
parameters:
  lr:
    distribution: uniform
    min: 1.e-5  # This is the problem.
    max: 0.001

command:
  - ${env}
  - ${interpreter}
  - ${program}
  - ${args}
EOF

wandb sweep --controller ./sweep.yaml
)

Guesses

Something is randomly trying to stringify things?

[timxzz]

This problem still exists with version: 0.10.18

[timxzz]

The root cause is indeed as @EricCousineau-TRI said can be PyYAML. Here is a link from stackoverflow addressing an workaround: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30458977/yaml-loads-5e-6-as-string-and-not-a-number