0.11.0

Major Features

• Apple Core ML model converter
• Support for Keras v1.2.2
• Gluon Interface (experimental)
• Updated LICENSE and NOTICE files.
• For more information see full release notes

API Changes

• Added CachedOp. You can now cache the operators that’s called frequently with the same set of arguments to reduce overhead.
• Added sample_multinomial for sampling from multinomial distributions.
• Added trunc operator for rounding towards zero.
• Added linalg_gemm, linalg_potrf, ... operators for lapack support.
• Added verbose option to Initializer for printing out initialization details.
• Added DeformableConvolution to contrib from the Deformable Convolutional Networks paper.
• Added float64 support for dot and batch_dot operator.
• allow_extra is added to Module.set_params to ignore extra parameters.
• Added mod operator for modulo.
• Added multi_precision option to SGD optimizer to improve training with float16. Resnet50 now achieves the same accuracy when trained with float16 and gives 50% speedup on Titan XP.

Performance Improvements

• ImageRecordIter now stores data in pinned memory to improve GPU memcopy speed.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug in Adam that causes weight decay to be handled incorrectly. If you are using Adam, you may need to tune learning rate a little to get the same performance as previous versions.
• Remove WaitToRead in dist-kvstore: Improves performance 20-30% for distributed training.
• Cython interface is fixed. make cython and python setup.py install --with-cython should install the cython interface and reduce overhead in applications that use imperative/bucketing.
• Fixed various bugs in Faster-RCNN example: #6486
• Fixed various bugs in SSD example.
• Fixed out argument not working for zeros, ones, full, etc.
• expand_dims now supports backward shape inference.
• Fixed a bug in rnn. BucketingSentenceIter that causes incorrect layout handling on multi-GPU.
• Fixed context mismatch when loading optimizer states.
• Fixed a bug in ReLU activation when using MKL.
• Fixed a few race conditions that causes crashes on shutdown.
• Fixed image-classification example code.

Refactors

• Refactored TShape/TBlob to use int64 dimensions and DLTensor as internal storage. Getting ready for migration to DLPack. As a result TBlob::dev_mask_ and TBlob::stride_ are removed.

Known Issues

• Inception-V3 model can be converted into CoreML format but is unable to run on Xcode.