Author Archives: Odysseas Vavourakis

The Tale of the Undead Logger

A picture of a scary-looking zombie in a lumberjack outfit holding an axe, in the middle of a forest at night, staring menacingly at the viewer.
Fear the Undead Logger all ye who enter here.
For he may strike, and drain the life out nodes that you hold dear.
Among the smouldering embers of jobs you thought long dead,
he lingers on, to terrorise, and cause you frightful dread.
But hark ye all my tale to save you from much pain,
and fight ye not anew the battles I have fought in vain.

Or simply…

… Tips and Tricks to Use When wandb Logger Just. Won’t. DIE.

The Weights and Biases Logger (illustrated above by DALL-E; admittedly with some artistic license) hardly requires introduction. It’s something of an industry standard at this point, well-regarded for the extensive (and extensible) functionality of its interactive dashboard; for advanced features like checkpointing model weights in the cloud and automating hyperparameter sweeps; and for integrating painlessly with frameworks like PyTorch and PyTorch Lightning. It simplifies your life as an ML researcher enormously by making it easy to track and compare experiments, monitor system resource usage, all while giving you very fun interactive graphs to play with.
Plot arbitrary quantities you may be logging against each other, interactively, on the fly, however you like. In Dark Mode, of course (you’re a professional, after all). Here’s a less artistic impression to give you an idea, should you have been living under a rock:

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