[App]: Config entries that are descriptive strings with whitespace do not show up as options for Group

[albertfgu]

Current Behavior

This is a mix between a bug and a feature request issue.

The Feature

Suppose I want to launch 5 runs and create a wandb plot where each line is labeled a certain way; essentially create a reasonable legend automatically that can be screenshotted quickly. So maybe I want to label my first config "Method A", my second config "Method B", my third config "Method A - variant 1", and so on.

This feels like an extreme common use case, so there may be existing ways to do this that I can't figure out.

The Bug

I tried to approximate this by utilizing the fact that the "Group" feature automatically labels runs by their groupby keys (e.g. if I put a set of runs on a plot and Group by "hparam", then the lines will show up as "hparam=0.1", "hparam=0.2", etc.). So I added a dummy key to my config called "train.desc", amended the configs with config.train.desc="Method A" and so on. I would then expect each run to be labeled with something like train.desc="Method A".

For each run, this field does show up properly in the config (screenshot for example).

However, when I put the runs into a chart and try to Group by train.desc, this key does not show up at all. I can't figure out why - the only thing I can imagine is that it's explicitly removing keys that are string valued whitespace, although I don't know for what reason. Otherwise this seems like a bug.

Expected Behavior

Grouping by any string-valued fields should be possible.

Steps To Reproduce

No response

Screenshots

No response

Environment

OS: macOS

Browsers: Chrome

Version:

Additional Context

No response

[luisbergua]

Hi @albertfgu, thanks for your detailed explanation! I've investigated this and it seems that the issue here is not related with whitespaces but with the desc name. I've tried other names instead of desc and the key appears. Could you try if this works? I'll try to figure out why is this happening!

[luisbergua]

Hi @albertfgu, after exploring this, it's definitely a bug, so I've reported to our Engineering Team, Can I help you in any other way?

[albertfgu]

Thanks for looking into it!

As for this feature, should I file another feature request for it? I think it may be a common use case.

[luisbergua]

Hi @albertfgu, no worry, I've already reported this, so you don't need to file another ticket. Thanks!

[exalate-issue-sync[bot]]

WandB Internal User commented: albertfgu commented: Thanks for looking into it!

As for this feature, should I file another feature request for it? I think it may be a common use case.

[exalate-issue-sync[bot]]

WandB Internal User commented: luisbergua commented: Hi @albertfgu, no worry, I've already reported this, so you don't need to file another ticket. Thanks!