Description & Motivation

The motivation for this proposal is as follows: when you store classes (not-yet instantiated, but from the main file) in a module's hyperparameters to instantiate them later, the related entries in the dictionary are not sanitized.

Pitch

For example, let's say my configuration is this:

class Stepper():
    def __init__(self):
        self.scale = 3

    def step(self):
        return self.scale

config = {
    "stepper": Stepper
}

Then I want the hyperparameters that will be logged to look like this:

config = {
    "criterion": "Stepper"
}

And not like this:

config = {
    "criterion": "<__main__.Stepper object at 0x352255190>"
}

Alternatives

When a module has at least one __init__ argument, this problem doesn't exist:

class Stepper:
    def __init__(self, scale):
        self.scale = scale

    def forward(self, x):
        return self.scale * x

config = {
    "stepper": Stepper,
    "config": {"scale": 0.0001}
}

Results in a logged configuration dictionary of form:

config = {
    "criterion": "Stepper",
    "config": {"scale": 0.0001}
}

Additional context

No response

cc @Borda