TensorFlow: v0.7.0 Release

Major Features and Improvements

• Allow using any installed Cuda >= 7.0 and cuDNN >= R2, and add support for cuDNN R4
• Added a contrib/ directory for unsupported or experimental features, including higher level layers module
• Added an easy way to add and dynamically load user-defined ops
• Built out a good suite of tests, things should break less!
• Added MetaGraphDef which makes it easier to save graphs with metadata
• Added assignments for "Deep Learning with TensorFlow" udacity course

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

• Added a versioning framework for GraphDefs to ensure compatibility
• Enforced Python 3 compatibility
• Internal changes now show up as sensibly separated commits
• Open-sourced the doc generator
• Un-fork Eigen
• Simplified the BUILD files and cleaned up C++ headers
• TensorFlow can now be used as a submodule in another bazel build
• New ops (e.g., *fft, *_matrix_solve)
• Support for more data types in many ops
• Performance improvements
• Various bugfixes
• Documentation fixes and improvements

Breaking Changes to the API

• AdjustContrast kernel deprecated, new kernel AdjustContrastv2 takes and outputs float only. adjust_contrast now takes all data types.
• adjust_brightness's delta argument is now always assumed to be in [0,1] (as is the norm for images in floating point formats), independent of the data type of the input image.
• The image processing ops do not take min and max inputs any more, casting safety is handled by saturate_cast, which makes sure over- and underflows are handled before casting to data types with smaller ranges.
• For C++ API users: IsLegacyScalar and IsLegacyVector are now gone from TensorShapeUtils since TensorFlow is scalar strict within Google (for example, the shape argument to tf.reshape can't be a scalar anymore). The open source release was already scalar strict, so outside Google IsScalar and IsVector are exact replacements.
• The following files are being removed from tensorflow/core/public/:
  • env.h -> ../platform/env.h
  • status.h -> ../lib/core/status.h
  • tensor.h -> ../framework/tensor.h
  • tensor_shape.h -> ../framework/tensor_shape.h
  • partial_tensor_shape.h -> ../framework/partial_tensor_shape.h
  • tensorflow_server.h deleted
• For C++ API users: TensorShape::ShortDebugString has been renamed to DebugString, and the previous DebugString behavior is gone (it was needlessly verbose and produced a confusing empty string for scalars).
• GraphOptions.skip_common_subexpression_elimination has been removed. All graph optimizer options are now specified via GraphOptions.OptimizerOptions.
• ASSERT_OK / EXPECT_OK macros conflicted with external projects, so they were renamed TF_ASSERT_OK, TF_EXPECT_OK. The existing macros are currently maintained for short-term compatibility but will be removed.
• The non-public nn.rnn and the various nn.seq2seq methods now return just the final state instead of the list of all states.
• tf.scatter_update now no longer guarantees that lexicographically largest index be used for update when duplicate entries exist.
• tf.image.random_crop(image, [height, width]) is now tf.random_crop(image, [height, width, depth]), and tf.random_crop works for any rank (not just 3-D images). The C++ RandomCrop op has been replaced with pure Python.
• Renamed tf.test.GetTempDir and tf.test.IsBuiltWithCuda to tf.test.get_temp_dir and tf.test.is_built_with_cuda for PEP-8 compatibility.
• parse_example's interface has changed, the old interface is accessible in legacy_parse_example (same for related functions).
• New Variables are not added to the same collection several times even if a list with duplicates is passed to the constructor.
• The Python API will now properly set the list member of AttrValue in constructed GraphDef messages for empty lists. The serialization of some graphs will change, but the change is both forwards and backwards compatible. It will break tests that compare a generated GraphDef to a golden serialized GraphDef (which is discouraged).

Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from many people at Google, as well as:

Akiomi Kamakura, Alex Vig, Alexander Rosenberg Johansen, Andre Cruz, Arun Ahuja, Bart Coppens, Bernardo Pires, Carl Vondrick, Cesar Salgado, Chen Yu, Christian Jauvin, Damien Aymeric, Dan Vanderkam, Denny Britz, Dongjoon Hyun, Eren Güven, Erik Erwitt, Fabrizio Milo, G. Hussain Chinoy, Jim Fleming, Joao Felipe Santos, Jonas Meinertz Hansen, Joshi Rekha, Julian Viereck, Keiji Ariyama, Kenton Lee, Krishna Sankar, Kristina Chodorow, Linchao Zhu, Lukas Krecan, Mark Borgerding, Mark Daoust, Moussa Taifi, Nathan Howell, Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu, Nick Sweeting, Niklas Riekenbrauck, Olivier Grisel, Patrick Christ, Povilas Liubauskas, Rainer Wasserfuhr, Romain Thouvenin, Sagan Bolliger, Sam Abrahams, Taehoon Kim, Timothy J Laurent, Vlad Zavidovych, Yangqing Jia, Yi-Lin Juang, Yuxin Wu, Zachary Lipton, Zero Chen, Alan Wu, @brchiu, @emmjaykay, @jalammar, @Mandar-Shinde, @nsipplswezey, @ninotoshi, @panmari, @prolearner and @rizzomichaelg.

We are also grateful to all who filed issues or helped resolve them, asked and answered questions, and were part of inspiring discussions.