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tensorflow / tensorboard

TensorFlow's Visualization Toolkit
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Line charts become degenerate when runs are changed in other dashboards. #554

Closed chihuahua closed 6 years ago

chihuahua commented 7 years ago

Visit the scalars dashboard. Navigate to the image dashboard, and toggle any run. Navigate back to the scalars dashboard. Note the squished line charts.

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Part of why this happens is that TensorBoard includes all active dashboards in the DOM. All are hidden except for the selected dashboard. https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorboard/blob/c52bd79c7d99a306cadb5c203810cb10f3660c42/tensorboard/components/tf_tensorboard/tf-tensorboard.html#L202

Hence, the attach handler for each dashboard is not a proxy for whether the dashboard is selected. In general, there is no systematic way for TensorBoard to inform each dashboard of whether it is currently selected.

chihuahua commented 7 years ago

@wchargin, we could modify this logic to attach and detach dashboards to/from the DOM. https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorboard/blob/c52bd79c7d99a306cadb5c203810cb10f3660c42/tensorboard/components/tf_tensorboard/tf-tensorboard.html#L202

Then, dashboards could respond to being selected or unselected via whether handling attachment. What do you think?

chihuahua commented 7 years ago

An alternative solution: Make tf-tensorboard set isSelected on individual dashboards.

chihuahua commented 7 years ago

Come to think I prefer the alternative of setting isSelected. @dandelionmane noted that we've switched back and forth between using dom-if vs hiding dashboards.

Setting isSelected would decouple dashboard selection with DOM attachment, which I think is clearer to developers. Plugins would just observe changes to isSelected. Recognition over recall.

wchargin commented 7 years ago

It is worth keeping in mind that the root cause of this issue and related issues is that Plottable’s drawing code relies extensively on interacting with the DOM: measuring, tweaking, remeasuring, etc. If we render a Plottable chart when the component is not actually shown on screen, the measurements that it gets will not be valid (e.g., will be all zeros), and this manifests as “squished plots” and the like. To combat this, we try our best—at least in the scalars dashboard—to only update Plottable charts when they’re in view: we’ve added integration points in a number of places, such as adapting tf-collapsable-pane to report which of its pages is active, to compute an approximation of the visibility function. But this is still an approximation, and while adding something like isSelected will offer the opportunity for one hole to be plugged, it is not a robust solution, and does not solve the root problem. Note also that I say “offer the opportunity” to plug this hole: every plugin will still have to include integration code to inspect/observe the isSelected property and change its rendering behavior appropriately, which is not great.

It would be wonderful if we could address the underlying problem instead of bloating all plugins with patching code. I hear that @dandelionmane knows something about Plottable; do you have any thoughts on the matter? (I don’t really know what a solution would look like.)

chihuahua commented 7 years ago

Yeah, @dandelionmane, any way we could fix this within Plottable? That would help others too.