Excited to know what’s your favorite W&B feature! Bonus points for non mainstream features!
I think I’m undecided between the parameter importance plot and dark mode in the app! 
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My favourite W&B feature is alerts 
There is a crazy story behind this to why this is my favourite feature:
I was pretraining a speech model with a huge dataset (~10,000) hours.
Hardware: 16 x A-100 on GCP
The original plan was to train for 4 days because the machine was very costly($50 per hour). Of Course I was using W&B to track logs of the training but as I was working alone on this project, I had to go for a nap at night.
In case of a crash due to CUDA memory issues or any issue, I would receive a notification on the mobile [This was something that was coded in the exception handling]. Unfortunately, the machine at midnight was automatically restarted by GCP. They do this once a week to instances in which the “Automatic Restart” flag is turned to true.
Now, to my surprise the code did not go into the exception block as I have not accounted for an exception occuring due to the shut down of the machine. The biggest scam here is that the instance restarted and did not shut down which means the training that was going on in the background stopped and the machine restarted again. So I will be charged by GCP but my model training is not restarted.
Fortunately, alerts were on in my W&B account and after 10 minutes of the crash, I received an email. I woke up at midnight to drink water and saw the email. I was shocked to see what had happened. I was charged only for 2 hours extra but this could well have been 10-12 hours because normally I assume that if I did not receive any exception during the first epoch then everything is going fine.
W&B alerts saved me atleast 700$ 
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I work for W&B so I’m biased but for me it has to be dashboards. I’m always discovering new cool things I can do, if I had to choose which parts of dashboards I like the best it would be:
- live updating plots from multiple runs / teammates
- all the filtering / aggregation you can do like “Group by batch size” or “show me runs with conv width 128”
- Moving plots around and creating my own custom workspace
Edit: I realise I don’t get the bonus points for “non mainstream features” 
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I just LOVE the parallel coordinates plot in dashboards!
I find it really useful to understand the impact of different hyperparameter combinations on the final metric.
I can’t believe I’ve been tracking experiments in a spreadsheet before this. 
Also, there’s something about those wavy lines that’s just so oddly satisfying.
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It’s the dashboards for me too 
Helps to take a quick glance at all the plots, all in one place 
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I like the Dashboards 
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I like Dashboards too! Although, I am only starting to realize the depth of the product and there’s much more that you can do with tables, custom charts etc.
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I’m a big fan of Reports. They’re the perfect format for storing results and discoveries that I uncover in my project/run/sweep pages. I use some of them like dashboards – they’re more powerful than dashboards based on e.g. run pages, once you get the hang of it – and use others more like blog posts or demos.
6 Likes
New to wandb but finding custom tables → reports was the big hook for me…
wandb.Table(data=my_data, columns = ['col_1, col_2"])
Building MLPs from scratch (studies) - reporting custom data + sweeps is op!
1 Like