Anonymous Mode
Are you publishing code that you want anyone to be able to run easily? Use Anonymous Mode to let someone run your code, see a W&B dashboard, and visualize results without needing to create a Weights & Biases account first.
Allow results to be logged in Anonymous Mode with wandb.init(
anonymous="allow"
)
Publishing a paper? Please cite W&B, and if you have questions about how to make your code accessible while using W&B, reach out to us at support@wandb.com.
How does someone without an account see results?โ
If someone runs your script and you have to set anonymous="allow"
:
- Auto-create temporary account: W&B checks for an account that's already signed in. If there's no account, we automatically create a new anonymous account and save that API key for the session.
- Log results quickly: The user can run and re-run the script, and automatically see results show up in the W&B dashboard UI. These unclaimed anonymous runs will be available for 7 days.
- Claim data when it's useful: Once the user finds valuable results in W&B, they can easily click a button in the banner at the top of the page to save their run data to a real account. If they don't claim a run, it will be deleted after 7 days.
Anonymous run links are sensitive. These links allow anyone to view and claim the results of an experiment for 7 days, so make sure to only share links with people you trust. If you're trying to share results publicly, but hide the author's identity, please contact us at support@wandb.com to share more about your use case.
What happens to users with existing accounts?โ
If you set anonymous="allow"
in your script, we will check to make sure there's not an existing account first, before creating an anonymous account. This means that if a W&B user finds your script and runs it, their results will be logged correctly to their account, just like a normal run.
What are features that aren't available to anonymous users?โ
- No persistent data: Runs are only saved for 7 days in an anonymous account. Users can claim anonymous run data by saving it to a real account.
- No artifact logging: Runs will print a warning on the command line that you can't log an artifact to an anonymous run.
- No profile or settings pages: Certain pages aren't available in the UI, because they're only useful for real accounts.
Example usageโ
Try the example notebook to see how anonymous mode works.
import wandb
# Start a run allowing anonymous accounts
wandb.init(anonymous="allow")
# Log results from your training loop
wandb.log({"acc": 0.91})
# Mark the run as finished
wandb.finish()