NEWS.txt

.. _NEWS:

=============
Release Notes
=============

Theano 0.8 rc1 (29th of February, 2016)
=======================================

We recommend that everybody update to this version.

Highlights:
- Python 2 and 3 support with the same code base
- Faster optimization
- New GPU back-end
   - Float16 new back-end (need cuda 7.5)
   - Multi dtypes
   - Multi-GPU support in the same process
- Integration of CuDNN for better GPU performance
- Many Scan improvements (execution speed up, ...)
- optimizer=fast_compile moves computation to the GPU.
- Better convolution on CPU and GPU. (CorrMM, cudnn, 3d conv, more parameter)
- Interactive visualization of graphs with d3viz
- cnmem (better memory management on GPU)
- BreakpointOp
- Multi-GPU for data parallism via Platoon (https://github.com/mila-udem/platoon/)


A total of 135 people contributed to this release, see the list at the bottom.


Installation:
- Better blas detection
- Fixes for more recent software and OS versions
- Support Anaconda on Windows

Bug fixes:
- GpuJoin now supports negative axis
- Fix GpuCumsum for negative axis

Interface Deprecation (a warning is printed):
- Deprecate Param class, use In instead

Interface Changes:
- Rename DownsampleFactorMax to Pool.
- tensor.stack now uses the same interface as numpy.stack
- optimizer=fast_compile moves computation to the GPU
- Raise the user stack trace more frequently.
- Change dev version numbering to follow the PEP 440


New Interface (reuses existing functionality):
- theano.tensor.nnet.relu
- theano.tensor.nnet.elu
- BatchNormalization.
- MaxAndArgmax support axis=None
- Add theano.tensor.compress (equivalent of numpy.compress)
- theano.tensor.signal.downsamples.max_pool_2d_same_size
- COp
- __props__

New features
- tensor.unique
- map_variables
- erfcx
- mgrid, ogrid
- allclose
- BreakpointOp
- Make bincount work on GPU
- SolveOp on GPU
- Optional optimization remove_all_assert
- AllocEmpty
- LogSoftmax, for stability optimization when the crossentropy optimization does not apply.
- theano.tensor.repeat works on GPU
- BatchedDot on the GPU and faster on the CPU.
- Faster batched_tensordot and make it work on GPU.
- SoftmaxGrad grad
- 3d conv via CorrMM on the GPU
- CPU Max Pool support of padding and strides!=windows size
- theano.function() now accepts a dict for the outputs. When doing this, the function will return a dict. Helpful to keep track of which output is what.
- Warn for unknown or misspelled theano config variables
- theano.tensor.tile update (accept symbolic reps, work on GPU)
- scan how have a strict flag. If set to True, this make scan building faster and could make execution faster.
- theano.tensor.signal.conv2d(2d,2d) output 2d answer


Speed-ups:
- Faster SetSubtensor on the GPU.
- Support more reduction pattern on the GPU.
- More graph optimization
- Faster graph optimization
- GpuCrossentropySoftmaxArgmax1HotWithBias


Crash/no return fixes:
- Fix crash in the assert op grad
- Fix curand crash on Mac
- Multiple Fix scan crashes
- Finish to update all Op.grad() implementation to the new interface

Others:
- Support ARM processor.
- Better tests
- Code clean up.
- Doc updates
- doctest and sphinx test in travis
- More tests tagged as slow
- Better same_shape implementation
- More op with c code to lower overhead
- Custom pickler for SharedVariable theano.misc.pkl_utils.{dump,load}
- function_dump to help us reproduce user error during compilation
- assert_no_cpu_op
- pep8, flake8
- Better error messages
- On non-default modes, reduce the number of allocation when allow_gc=False
- Better lock


Committers for this dev version only:
- Frederic Bastien
- Arnaud Bergeron
- Pierre Luc Carrier
- Iban Harlouchet
- Pascal Lamblin
- Chienli Ma
- David Warde-Farley
- Amjad Almahairi
- Tim Cooijmans
- Christof Angermueller
- Nicolas Ballas
- Ziye Fan
- Caglar
- Sina Honari
- Roy Xue
- hantek
- Mohammad Pezeshki
- Melanie Ducoffe
- Alexandre de Brebisson
- Harm de Vries
- Alex Lamb
- Ramana.S
- Saizheng Zhang
- Francesco Visin
- Ying Zhang
- Bart van Merrienboer
- Cesar Laurent
- Jan Schlüter
- Xavier Bouthillier
- Iulian Vlad Serban
- Samira Shabanian
- Sigurd Spieckermann
- Dmitrii Serdiuk
- Kelvin Xu
- Li Yao
- Sebastien Jean
- Thomas Mesnard
- Seon-Wook Park
- Dustin Webb
- Mikhail Korobov
- orhanf
- Daniel Renshaw
- Julien Rebetez
- Sean Lee
- TimSalimans
- Andre Holzner
- Gijs van Tulder
- Guillaume Alain
- Julien Demouth
- Markus Beissinger
- Mehdi Mirza
- Moslem Kazemi
- Saxenauts
- skaae
- Anatoly Belikov
- Diogo Moitinho de Almeida
- Kashif Rasul
- Laurent Dinh
- Rémy Léone
- gw0 [http://gw.tnode.com/]
- mronian
- vesis84
- Benni
- JesseLivezey
- Marius Killinger
- Matt Graham
- Matthew Willson
- Piotr Frankowski
- Stefan Krastanov
- vdumoulin
- Luke Metz
- Anish Shah
- Balázs Hidasi
- Colin Raffel
- Cory Lorenz
- Doug
- Jesse Livezey
- John Salvatier
- John Zedlewski
- Jonathan Ho
- Kaixhin
- Liang-Chi Hsieh
- Lucas Beyer
- Marc-Alexandre Cote
- Martin Arjovsky
- Matthias Kümmerer
- Sirisha Rambhatla
- Vincent Michalski
- briancheung
- ivdorelian
- jan-matthis
- jojolalpin
- joncrall
- peterjsadowski
- scottsievert
- Étienne Simon
- A. Flaxman
- AlOa
- Albert Zeyer
- Andrea
- Andy Jiang
- Balázs
- Ben Poole
- Brian Cheung
- Christophe Van Gysel
- Claude Coulombe
- Clay McLeod
- Dario Garcia
- Jakob Lombacher
- Jakub Sygnowski
- Joao Felipe Santos
- John Arevalo
- Jonas Degrave
- Martin Thoma
- Mathieu Germain
- Matthew Koichi Grimes
- Michael Eickenberg
- Michael Opitz
- Paul Hollensen
- Prayag Verma
- Saatvik Shah
- Sergei Lebedev
- Vik Kamath
- Wei Ouyang
- Yi-Lin Juang
- Yurii Shevchuk
- Zach Dwiel
- dan
- eulerreich
- jotterbach
- rolf
- wuaalb