Feature request: global step slider for images

[pkern90]

I believe it would be handy to have a global slider for visualizing images from different steps. At the moment, when I try to compare different image inputs and outputs, I have to slide each image individually.

[wchargin]

cc @chihuahua.

Could gauge support from Ian. If you implement this, you might ask RJ whether he'd want the same thing for audio.

[chihuahua]

Some internal folks on the image search team (among others) have also asked for a global slider. The challenge is that the steps might differ per image, although the steps are often the same within a run such as train or eval (unless a user for some reason decides to avoid merging summaries and only collect certain summaries at certain steps).

What if we tried this out. #471 should get us started. Maybe we can let the user select a global step for all the tags within each run, and if the user later changes the step for a specific image, that global slider is overriden (and the step it shows is grayed out).

FYI, @goodfeli and @rryan. And yeah, per @wchargin, this seems applicable to audio too.

[goodfeli]

SGTM

[wchargin]

@pkern90 @goodfeli Are you looking for a single slider that uniformly sets the step for all runs, or an assortment of all sliders one for each run (as opposed to one for each run–tag combination)?

[pkern90]

@wchargin for me personally a global slider would be more important. Having said that, I also believe that additional run based sliders which override the global slider could come in handy. I guess the problem would be the placement of the sliders, so it doesn't blow up the UI to much.

[chihuahua]

What's the use case for comparing images between runs? A run is like train or eval, right? Thanks!

[pkern90]

Different runs could be different models/parameters (experiments) for the same problem. Since not all models train with the same speed (number of steps) you might want to compare the outputs of different experiments from different steps.

[chihuahua]

OK, new proposal: Lets try out 1 global slider for all runs. The advantage is that we can conveniently specify 1 step cap for all runs. The disadvantage is that runs can differ in sampling rate of summaries as well as max step, so if we rely on 1 global slider alone, some steps might become inaccessible to certain runs.

Imagine a run A at step 10K and another run B at step 1K. TensorBoard samples for 10 events per run (or tag really, but assume all tags share the same steps here). With 1 global slider sampled at the rate of run A, we can access all sampled images of run A, but only 2 of run B.

Hence, how about we try 1 global slider but also maintain the individual slider per image. @wchargin, thoughts?

[pkern90]

One global slider for all runs sounds good to me.

[tachim]

Any updates here?

[nfelt]

@tachim we are stretched pretty thin right now so we can make no guarantees on when we might be able to work on this. I'll mark it contributions welcome though.