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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 W&B account first.

Allow results to be logged in Anonymous Mode with wandb.init(anonymous="allow")

info

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":

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
caution

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()
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