This is the release note of v5.0.0b3. See here for the complete list of solved issues and merged PRs.

Highlights

New functions have been added: F.einsum, F.lgamma, F.digamma, F.polygamma
More built-in Links support chainer.config.dtype configuration introduced in v5.0.0b2.

Changes without compatibility

Please refer to the Upgrade Guide for details.

Link.copyparams has been changed to copy persistent values in addition to parameters (#4997). You can use newly-introduced copy_persistent=False option to emulate the previous behavior.
FunctionNode classes exposed under chainer.functions namespace have been removed (#4421). Please use wrapper functions under chainer.functions instead of directly using classes.

Add F.einsum (#4644)
Add logarithmic gamma and related functions: F.lgamma, F.digamma, and F.polygamma (#4720)
Improve performance of batch normalization (#4798, thanks @anaruse!)
Add StepShift extension (#4894, thanks @jinjiren!)
Add Laplace distribution (#4932)
Add LabeledZippedImageDataset (#4961, thanks @d0i!)
Add Bernoulli distribution (#5025)
Support default dtype: L.BatchNormalization and L.BatchRenormalization (#5034), L.Maxout (#5058), L.InceptionBN (#5062), L.StatefulMGU (#5084)
Support all float dtypes in F.mean_absolute_error (#5053)

Fix cuda.elementwise to up performance (#3787)
Support cuDNN in F.dropout (#3369, thanks @bonprosoft!)
Hide FunctionNode classes from chainer.functions namespace (#4421)
Infer input size in batchnorm using aggregate axes (#4673, thanks @tkanmae!)
Avoid zero division in F.normalize (#4769)
Fix for NumPy 1.15.0rc1 (#4832)
Create function to identify fashion-MNIST labels (#4860)
Rename all __call__ methods in Links to forward (#4912)
Refactor distribution (#4923)
Cleanup F.batch_normalization (#4964)
Run gradient clipping on GPU, if possible (#4982, thanks @shinh!)
Add log_scale option of Normal distritbuion (#4987)
Copy persistent values in Link.copyparams (#4997)
Remove obsolete code from batch (re)normalization (#5013)
Avoid hasattr in L.BatchNormalization (#5017)
Let F.depthwise_convolution_2d use F.convolution_2d internally (#5046)
Initialize gradient of uninitialized parameter with default dtype when initializer is callable (#5064)
Support 0-dim params in distributions (#5077)
Fix F.einsum to support NumPy 1.15rc1 (#5079)
Fix dataset path to use os.path.join (#5100)

Fix GetItem.backward for 0-dim boolean index (#4958)
Fix exception not raised when unsupported format is specified when dumping computational graph (#4971)
Fix iDeep call in MultiAdd (#5056)
Fix kernels not memorized (#5061)

Add Chainer at a Glance documentation (#3127)
Add upgrade guide for auto_new_epoch (#4956)
Fix cross-reference links in StandardUpdater (#4968)
Add docs for Extension.name (#4980)
Fix docs of chainer.config.dtype (#4981)
Clarify how arguments are handled in L.Linear docs (#4983)
Fix docstrings in computational_graph (#4984)
Add support for NumPy 1.14 in docs (#4990)
Fix docs of L.NStepBiRNNTanh, L.NStepLSTMBase, L.NStepLSTM and L.NStepBiLSTM (#4991, thanks @mori97!)
Update docs in F.upsampling_2d according to new F.max_pooling_2d (#4992)
Fix verb error in chainer.functions.fft docstring (#5002, thanks @butsugiri!)
Fix typo in n_step_gru docs (#5006)
Add notes about relationship between F.dilated_convolution_2d and F.convolution_2d (#5010)
Fix broken notations in F.linear docs (#5011)
Add rules regarding use of pytest module (#5012)
Fix typo in README of seq2seq (#5018, thanks @MannyKayy!)
Improve Variable guide (#5030)
Fix typo in docs template (#5035)
Fix attribute name collisions in docstring (#5037)
Fix cross-link and format of Chainer at a glance documentation (#5044)
Fix dead link to numpy.dtype.kind in Tips (#5051)
Clarify distinction between chainer.dataset and chainer.datasets (#5057)
Fix broken docs in PolynomialShift (#5089)
Update caffe.rst docs (#5090)
Add upgrade guide for Link.copyparams changes (#5093)
Fix typo in the docstring of ChainList (#5098)