fig

Percy Liang Last updated Nov. 24, 2012.

General-purpose collection of Java libraries and tools to faciliate writing research code and managing experiments. The main features include:

Command-line options: your algorithm probably has several free parameters, which you'd like to specify dynamically from the command line. Simply define variables and get them automatically populated.

In your code (examples/Sample.java):

@Option public int N = 5;
@Option public Random random = new Random(1);

On the command-line (run this from examples after typing make):

java -cp .:../fig.jar Sample -N 10 -random 42

Hierarchical logging: avoid messy log files by organizing them into a hierarchy.

In your code:

LogInfo.begin_track("Simulating");
for (int i = 0; i < N; i++) {
  double x = SampleUtils.sampleGaussian(random);
  LogInfo.logs("Sample %d: %f", i, x);
  stats.add(x);
}
LogInfo.end_track();

LogInfo.begin_track("Statistics");
LogInfo.logs("Mean: %f", stats.mean());
LogInfo.logs("Stddev: %f", stats.stddev());
LogInfo.end_track();

What's printed:

main() {
  Computing {
    Sample 0
    Sample 1
    Sample 2
  }
  Statistics {
    Mean: -0.431150
    Stddev: 0.493404
  }
}

Logging can get quite expensive, both in terms of disk space and time spent writing, and often one has to log selectively. You can automatically subsample based on amount of output you want per second. For example:

java -cp .:../fig.jar Sample -N 1000000 -msPerLine 1000

will log only once every second, so you get output like this instead of 1000000 lines (if each sample takes longer, then more lines will be printed):

main() {
  Simulating {
    Sample 0: -0.668791
    Sample 1: -0.880499
    Sample 2: 0.255840
    Sample 3002: -1.525517
    Sample 18323: -0.741311
    Sample 63567: 0.524057
    Sample 188210: -0.886195
    Sample 424063: 0.799244
    Sample 742668: -1.128977
    ... 999991 lines omitted ...
  } [2.5s, cum. 2.5s]
  Statistics {
    Mean: 0.001096
    Stddev: 1.000084
  }
} [2.5s]

Executions:

Suppose you are running your program with 100 different parameters. How do you keep track of all the outputs? Each time you execute a fig program, a new directory is created which will store all the outputs of that execution along with the parameters.

mkdir -p state/execs
java -cp .:../fig.jar Sample -execPoolDir state/execs

This will create state/execs/0.exec with the following files:

info.map  log  options.help  options.map  output.map  samples  time.map

The map files contain a set of tab-separated key-value pairs, one per line containing various statistics of the run, some auto-generated by fig, others user generated.

log: copy of whatever's printed to stdout.
options.map: contains all the options processed by the OptionsParser (defined by @Option).
output.map: Execution.putOutput(key, value) prints to this file.
samples: created in this particular code (Execution.getFile("samples") gives us the path).

If you run the command again, it will write to state/execs/1.exec, then state/execs/2.exec, etc.

Servlet:

Once you get up to 1000.exec, you'll want a systematic way of viewing the executions. fig provides a servlet which allows you to browse executions, group them, and comment on them. Note that the executions don't even have to be generated by fig. The servlet simply reads tab-separated files from execution directories named 0.exec, 1.exec, etc., which could be generated by any program.

The first time, type the following to download Apache Tomcat:

./tomcat

By default, the fig servlet is password protected, so you will need to add the following line into conf/tomcat-users.xml in order to access it:

<user username="YOUR_USERNAME" password="YOUR_PASSWORD" roles="fig-user"/>

Now, start the server:

./tomcat start

Go to http://localhost:8080/fig to see the page.

General points:

You will see a table representing the root of a hierarchy. Each row denotes a child item, which you can descend into.
Use vi keys ('k' for up, 'j' for down, 'h' for left, 'r' for right) to move around. Type 'o' to open a child item, 'u' to go back to the parent.
To reduce server lag, the page does not refresh automatically. Therefore you must refresh manually (press 'R'). You may have to do this several times as the first 'R' just triggers asynchronous reloading.

Go into 'domains', then 'examples', then 'execs', then '(all)'. Each row will correspond to a different execution, and the columns are the fields, which have been read from the map files. You can make notes about executions by going to the 'note' field of a row, press 'E' (or double click on the cell). Type something and press enter. This will directly save the note to the map file.

To change the columns which are displayed, navigate to 'domains | examples | fieldSpecs | default' (press 'u' twice, 'o' on fieldSpecs, 'o' on 'default'). Each row here is a description of the field to be displayed. The 'data' column here for 'N' is '$options.map:Sample.N', which means that the value displayed for an execution will be gotten by reading the 'Sample.N' key from the options.map file.

To add an entry for 'random', type 'N' to create a new item (and enter 'random' for its name). Set 'data' to '$options.map:Sample.random'. You can move the new row up by pressing 'K' (and 'J' to move down). These movements are not recorded, so you must type 'as' to save (alternatively, select the action from the dropdown box). To view your changes, go back to 'domains | examples | execs | (all)'.

You can select items by typing 'x'. To purge executions, type 'ap'. Currently, this does not actually delete executions from disk, but just moves them away to 0.exec.purged, etc. so it doesn't show up in the servlet.

You can monitor the progress of the executions by refreshing the page. You can kill any executions by selecting them and typing 'ak' (this just creates a 'kill' file in the execution directory and waits for the process to kill itself).

Java libraries:

fig contains a suite of miscellaneous Java libraries. Here's a few of them:

fig.prob.SampleUtils: sample from various distributions
fig.basic.StopWatch: timing pieces of your code
fig.basic.ListUtils, fig.basic.MapUtils, fig.basic.NumUtils
fig.basic.LispTree: allows parsing/writing of Lisp-like S-expressions.

Command-line utilities:

bin/q: simple workqueue system for running jobs remotely.
bin/execrunner.rb: allows you to manage complex sets of parameters and automatically generate all the combinations.

yonatansito/fig

fig