A small extension of YACS with the following features:

Configure your ablations via CfgNodeFactory. CfgNodeFactory provides a procedural way to change configuration. Essentially, create a class for the set of configuration variations, and select different versions using __init__ named parameters. Example given in configs/ablations/*.

Avoid writing argparser for your configuration. An argparser for CfgNodeFactory instantiation parameters is directly created using a class method: CfgNodeFactory.get_argparser(). Further, if you want to specifically modify a certain configuration via command-line, simply add them with --cfg. prefix. Example shown in examples/demo.py.

Visualize your configuration with procXD. Use config.to_graph() to convert the configuration to networkx graphs, and use procXD's render_stack_sketch to create an excalidraw file with the configuration as shown below. Visualize excalidraw files either from web (just load the file at excalidraw.com) or with a vs-code plugin (simply open a .excalidraw file in vscode - example fines in example/xd_figures.

More importantly, verify the changes between ablations via procXD's render_comparitive_stack_sketch command.

Find more details in example/demo.py.

Simpy run python setup.py install to install wacky as a package in your python environment.

Do we really need to do this? I think generally in longer research projects configurations eventually do get large and unwieldy. At that point, it helps to do changes programmatically. This fits my usecase, but it may not be right for your usecase!

1. YACS: Generally Yacs is great and I have used it in all my previous projects. Howver, its hard to configure ablations procedurally, or have quick command line changes on to config directly with yacs.

2. Hydra: Pretty awesome, espcially since I am stealing the arbitrary config command-line support idea from hydra. Main drawback is that only works with yaml files, which prohibits programmatic configurations.

I used ChatGPT while creating this tool. It was helpful in many ways, especially with boiler-plate code and documentation. But it was misleading at times as well. Overall, it is helpful!