NEWS.txt

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


Theano 0.9.0 (20th of March, 2017)
==================================

This is a final release of Theano, version ``0.9.0``, with a lot of
new features, interface changes, improvements and bug fixes.

We recommend that everybody update to this version.

Highlights (since 0.8.0):
 - Better Python 3.5 support
 - Better numpy 1.12 support
 - Conda packages for Mac, Linux and Windows
 - Support newer Mac and Windows versions
 - More Windows integration:

   - Theano scripts (``theano-cache`` and ``theano-nose``) now works on Windows
   - Better support for Windows end-lines into C codes
   - Support for space in paths on Windows

 - Scan improvements:

   - More scan optimizations, with faster compilation and gradient computation
   - Support for checkpoint in scan (trade off between speed and memory usage, useful for long sequences)
   - Fixed broadcast checking in scan

 - Graphs improvements:

   - More numerical stability by default for some graphs
   - Better handling of corner cases for theano functions and graph optimizations
   - More graph optimizations with faster compilation and execution
   - smaller and more readable graph

 - New GPU back-end:

   - Removed warp-synchronous programming to get good results with newer CUDA drivers
   - More pooling support on GPU when cuDNN isn't available
   - Full support of ignore_border option for pooling
   - Inplace storage for shared variables
   - float16 storage
   - Using PCI bus ID of graphic cards for a better mapping between theano device number and nvidia-smi number
   - Fixed offset error in ``GpuIncSubtensor``

 - Less C code compilation
 - Added support for bool dtype
 - Updated and more complete documentation
 - Bug fixes related to merge optimizer and shape inference
 - Lot of other bug fixes, crashes fixes and warning improvements

A total of 123 people contributed to this release since 0.8.0, see list below.

Interface changes:
 - Merged ``CumsumOp/CumprodOp`` into ``CumOp``
 - In MRG module:

   - Replaced method ``multinomial_wo_replacement()`` with new method ``choice()``
   - Random generator now tries to infer the broadcast pattern of its output

 - New pooling interface
 - Pooling parameters can change at run time
 - Moved ``softsign`` out of sandbox to ``theano.tensor.nnet.softsign``
 - Using floatX dtype when converting empty list/tuple
 - ``Roll`` make the shift be modulo the size of the axis we roll on
 - ``round()`` default to the same as NumPy: half_to_even

Convolution updates:
 - Support of full and half modes for 2D and 3D convolutions including in ``conv3d2d``
 - Allowed pooling of empty batch
 - Implement ``conv2d_transpose`` convenience function
 - Multi-cores convolution and pooling on CPU
 - New abstract 3d convolution interface similar to the 2d convolution interface
 - Dilated convolution


GPU:
 - cuDNN: support versoin 5.1 and wrap batch normalization (2d and 3d) and RNN functions
 - Multiple-GPU, synchrone update (via platoon, use NCCL)
 - Gemv(matrix-vector product) speed up for special shape
 - cublas gemv workaround when we reduce on an axis with a dimensions size of 0
 - Warn user that some cuDNN algorithms may produce unexpected results in certain environments
   for convolution backward filter operations
 - ``GPUMultinomialFromUniform`` op now supports multiple dtypes
 - Support for ``MaxAndArgMax`` for some axis combination
 - Support for solve (using cusolver), erfinv and erfcinv
 - Implemented ``GpuAdvancedSubtensor``

New features:
 - ``OpFromGraph`` now allows gradient overriding for every input
 - Added Abstract Ops for batch normalization that use cuDNN when available and pure Theano CPU/GPU alternatives otherwise
 - Added gradient of solve, tensorinv (CPU), tensorsolve (CPU), searchsorted (CPU), DownsampleFactorMaxGradGrad (CPU)
 - Added Multinomial Without Replacement
 - Allowed partial evaluation of compiled function
 - More Rop support
 - Indexing support ellipsis: ``a[..., 3]```, ``a[1,...,3]``
 - Added ``theano.tensor.{tensor5,dtensor5, ...}``
 - compiledir_format support device
 - Added New Theano flag ``conv.assert_shape`` to check user-provided shapes at runtime (for debugging)
 - Added new Theano flag ``cmodule.age_thresh_use``
 - Added new Theano flag ``cuda.enabled``
 - Added new Theano flag ``nvcc.cudafe`` to enable faster compilation and import with old CUDA back-end
 - Added new Theano flag ``print_global_stats`` to print some global statistics (time spent) at the end
 - Added new Theano flag ``profiling.ignore_first_call``, useful to profile the new gpu back-end
 - remove ProfileMode (use Theano flag ``profile=True`` instead)


Others:
 - Split op now has C code for CPU and GPU
 - ``theano-cache list`` now includes compilation times
 - Speed up argmax only on GPU (without also needing the max)
 - More stack trace in error messages
 - Speed up cholesky grad
 - ``log(sum(exp(...)))`` now get stability optimized


Other more detailed changes:
 - Added Jenkins (gpu tests run on pull requests in addition to daily buildbot)
 - Removed old benchmark directory and other old files not used anymore
 - Use of 64-bit indexing in sparse ops to allow matrix with more then 2\ :sup:`31`\ -1 elements
 - Allowed more then one output to be an destructive inplace
 - More support of negative axis
 - Added the keepdims parameter to the norm function
 - Make scan gradient more deterministic

Commiters since 0.8.0:
 - Frederic Bastien
 - Arnaud Bergeron
 - Pascal Lamblin
 - Steven Bocco
 - Ramana Subramanyam
 - Simon Lefrancois
 - Gijs van Tulder
 - Benjamin Scellier
 - khaotik
 - Chiheb Trabelsi
 - Chinnadhurai Sankar
 - Cesar Laurent
 - Reyhane Askari
 - Mohammad Pezeshki
 - Alexander Matyasko
 - Alexandre de Brebisson
 - Mathieu Germain
 - Nan Rosemary Ke
 - Pierre Luc Carrier
 - Olivier Mastropietro
 - Thomas George
 - Saizheng Zhang
 - Iulian Vlad Serban
 - Francesco Visin
 - Caglar
 - Faruk Ahmed
 - Harm de Vries
 - Samira Shabanian
 - Vincent Dumoulin
 - Nicolas Ballas
 - Jakub Sygnowski
 - Jan Schlüter
 - Samira Ebrahimi Kahou
 - Mikhail Korobov
 - Fei Wang
 - Kv Manohar
 - Jesse Livezey
 - Kelvin Xu
 - Matt Graham
 - Ruslana Makovetsky
 - Sina Honari
 - Bryn Keller
 - Ciyong Chen
 - Vitaliy Kurlin
 - Zhouhan LIN
 - Gokula Krishnan
 - Kumar Krishna Agrawal
 - Ozan Çağlayan
 - Vincent Michalski
 - affanv14
 - Amjad Almahairi
 - Ray Donnelly
 - Tim Cooijmans
 - happygds
 - mockingjamie
 - Christos Tsirigotis
 - Florian Bordes
 - Ilya Kulikov
 - RadhikaG
 - Taesup (TS) Kim
 - Ying Zhang
 - Anton Chechetka
 - Karthik Karanth
 - Kirill Bobyrev
 - Rebecca N. Palmer
 - Yang Zhang
 - Yaroslav Ganin
 - Jonas Degrave
 - Liwei Cai
 - Lucas Beyer
 - Michael Harradon
 - Morgan Stuart
 - Tim Gasper
 - Xavier Bouthillier
 - p
 - texot
 - Andrés Gottlieb
 - Ben Poole
 - Bhavishya Pohani
 - Carl Thomé
 - David Bau
 - Dimitar Dimitrov
 - Evelyn Mitchell
 - Fei Zhan
 - Fuchai
 - Fábio Perez
 - Gennadiy Tupitsin
 - Gilles Louppe
 - Greg Ciccarelli
 - He
 - Huan Zhang
 - Kaixhin
 - Kevin Keraudren
 - Maltimore
 - Marc-Alexandre Cote
 - Marco
 - Marius F. Killinger
 - Martin Drawitsch
 - Maxim Kochurov
 - Micah Bojrab
 - Neil
 - Nizar Assaf
 - Rithesh Kumar
 - Rizky Luthfianto
 - Robin Millette
 - Roman Ring
 - Sander Dieleman
 - Sebastin Santy
 - Shawn Tan
 - Wazeer Zulfikar
 - Wojciech Głogowski
 - Yann N. Dauphin
 - gw0 [http://gw.tnode.com/]
 - hexahedria
 - hsintone
 - jakirkham
 - joncrall
 - root
 - superantichrist
 - tillahoffmann
 - valtron
 - wazeerzulfikar
 - you-n-g