List Sweeper plugin for Hydra

Sweeper plugin for Hydra which creates a list option additionally to the cartesian product ("grid"), which allows to sweep over the zipped list of parameters. This allows to test only a subset of the cartesian product and it is useful for small hyperparameter searches.

Installation

Clone this repository, navigate to its root folder hydra_list_sweeper and run:

pip install .

This will install the plugin in your current environment. Right now, there is no way to install it from PyPi, but this will be added in the future.

You can check if the plugin is installed by adding --info plugins to your command line. The plugin should be listed in the output as hydra_plugins.list_sweeper_plugin.list_sweeper.

In order to enable this plugin, you need to override the default sweeper in your configuration file:

defaults:
  - _self_
  # override this to use the new list sweeper:
  - override hydra/sweeper: list

Usage

List sweeper uses the a similar syntax as the standard sweeper, but instead of a params key, it uses grid_params and list_params:

hydra:
  mode: MULTIRUN
  sweeper:
    # standard grid search
    grid_params:
      env: 5_clubs_juggling, balancing_stick
    # additional list sweeper
    list_params:
      algorithm.lr: 0.001, 0.0001
      algorithm.beta_1: [0.9, 0.99]  # both notations work

This configuration will create 4 jobs:

env=5_clubs_juggling, algorithm.lr=0.001, algorithm.beta_1=0.9
env=5_clubs_juggling, algorithm.lr=0.0001, algorithm.beta_1=0.99
env=balancing_stick, algorithm.lr=0.001, algorithm.beta_1=0.9
env=balancing_stick, algorithm.lr=0.0001, algorithm.beta_1=0.99

Basically, it grids over all grid params, creating the standard cartesian product, and then for each of these combinations, it creates a job for each of the list params. You can additionally overwrite single values with command line arguments, and even define your grid_params in the command line:

hydra:
  mode: MULTIRUN
  sweeper:
    # additional list sweeper
    list_params:
      algorithm.lr: 0.001, 0.0001
      algorithm.beta_1: [0.9, 0.99]  # both notations work

Combined with this command

python my_app.py env=5_clubs_juggling,balancing_stick

will produce the same results as the first example. Also, you can override configs with the command line and the grid_params:

hydra:
  mode: MULTIRUN
  sweeper:
    # standard grid search
    grid_params:
      env: 5_clubs_juggling, balancing_stick
    # additional list sweeper
    list_params:
      algorithm.lr: 0.001, 0.0001
      algorithm.beta_1: [0.9, 0.99]  # both notations work

Combined with this command:

python my_app.py algorithm.epsilon=1.0e-4

will produce the same results as the first example, but epsilon will be set to 1.0e-4 for all jobs.

If you remove the list_params section, it will behave exactly as the standard grid sweeper (at least it should do, if you find a bug, please report it).