This release fixes an issue in v7.8.1 that documentation cannot be built on ReadTheDocs. No code changes are added since v7.8.1 release.

This is the release note of v7.8.1. See here for the complete list of solved issues and merged PRs.

This minor release allows importing Chainer with CuPy v10+ environment. Note that we still encourage Chainer v7 users to stay with CuPy v7.8.0 & CUDA 10.2 or earlier & cuDNN v7.6 if you don't have strong reasons to upgrade. A warning message will be shown if you run Chainer v7 with CuPy v8 or later, but you can disable it by setting the CHAINER_WARN_VERSION_MISMATCH=0 environment variable.

As announced previously, Chainer is under the maintenance phase. There are no further planned releases for Chainer v7 series.

Enhancements

• Prevent importing chainer immediately raises an error with cupy>=10 (#8616)

Documentation

• Pin NumPy version to the latest supported (#8617)

This is the release note of v7.8.0. See here for the complete list of solved issues and merged PRs.

For those who need to run Chainer on CUDA 11.1+, this release provides "limited" support for CuPy v8/v9. We confirmed that basic tests and examples run fine, but we still encourage Chainer v7 users to stay with CuPy v7.8.0 & CUDA 10.2 or earlier & cuDNN v7.6 if you don't have strong reasons to upgrade. A warning message will be shown if you run Chainer v7 with CuPy v8 or later, but you can disable it by setting the new CHAINER_WARN_VERSION_MISMATCH=0 environment variable. Please also understand that CuPy v10 is not compatible with Chainer.

As announced previously, Chainer is under the maintenance phase. There are no further planned releases for Chainer v7 series.

Enhancements

• Add CHAINER_WARN_VERSION_MISMATCH environment variable (#8588)
• Support importing cuDNN in CuPy v8 (#8590)

Bug Fixes

• Fix chainer.testing requiring pytest installed (#8611)

Code Fixes

• Import cupy.cuda.cudnn first to show preload warning (#8605)
• Fix random for CuPy v8/v9 (#8606)

Documentation

• Fix simple typo, cotiguousness -> contiguousness (#8595, thanks @timgates42!)
• Add CuPy version recommendation (#8608)

Installation

• Add detection of cupy-cuda110 (#8580)
• Add recent CuPy packages (#8609)

Examples

• Update Optuna examples (#8597)

Tests

• Update [jenkins] requirement (#8585)
• Ignore CuPy deprecation warnings in tests (#8589)
• Use Python 3.7 in ReadTheDocs (#8591)
• Use stable CuPy v7 in ONNX test (#8592)
• Avoid pytest.PytestUnknownMarkWarning (#8599)
• Remove travis for macOS (#8600)
• Fix broken skip condition (#8607)
• Fix debug print tests (#8610)

Others

• Mitigate breaking changes in CuPy v8 (#8583)
• Ignore NumPy 1.20 deprecations (#8598)

This release fixes an issue in v7.0.0 release that python_requires tag is missing.
Python 2 users (with pip 20.3+) no longer get Chainer v7 when doing pip install chainer. (#8545, diff)

This is the release note of v7.7.0. See here for the complete list of solved issues and merged PRs.

As announced previously, Chainer has reduced the release frequency from monthly to once every two months if there are changes that justify the release. We have decided to skip v7.5.0 and v7.6.0 in order to keep the Chainer version up to date with CuPy’s most recent release.

Bug Fixes

• Add support for spawn and forkserver start method in PickleDataset (#8465, thanks @zaltoprofen!)
• Fix array indexing in create_multi_node_evaluator (#8568)

Documentation

• Fix Reporter example (#8561)
• Add message about maintenance phase (#8567)

Tests

• Fix Travis macOS failure (#8562)
• Fix onnxruntime version for CI failure (#8564)
• Fix Chainer CIs (#8569)
• Use v7 for base branch detection (#8570)
• Install CuPy v7 for ChainerX Jenkins tests (#8574)

Others

• Update Twitter ID (#8572)
• Bump python version for RTD build (#8576)
• Fix onnxruntime version for CI failure (#8564)

This is the release note of v7.4.0. See here for the complete list of solved issues and merged PRs.

As announced previously, Chainer has reduced the release frequency from monthly to once every two months. We have decided to skip v7.3.0 in order to keep the Chainer version up to date with CuPy’s most recent release.

Enhancements

• Allow concat_arrays to be pickable (#8549)

Bug Fixes

• Allow start_methods other than fork on MultiprocessParallelUpdater (#7552)
• Fix backend.copyto for mismatched dtypes to CuPy ndarray (#8043)
• Fix optimizer.use_fp32_update on ChainerX model (#8382, thanks @y1r!)

Documentation

• Fix local_convolution_2d result shape documentation (#8553, thanks @msakai!)
• Update functions.rst (#8557, thanks @husisy!)

Tests

• Remove python 2.7 builds (#8550)
• Use CuPy v7 in CI (#8554)

This is the release note of v7.2.0. See here for the complete list of solved issues and merged PRs.

As announced previously, Chainer is currently under the maintenance phase. Considering the situation, we are going to reduce the release frequency of Chainer from monthly to once every two months. This does not affect the release frequency of CuPy.

Enhancements

• Add support for cupy-cuda102 (#8544)

Bug Fixes

• Calculate beta with static_code on F.BatchNormalization.forward (#8325)

Code Fixes

• Remove py2 warnings (#8542)

Documentation

• Remove stable version section from README (#7956)
• Add Optuna to README.md (#8537)
• Fix typo (#8541)

Examples

• Fix accuracy calculation of custom loop examples (#8534)

This is the release note of v7.1.0. See here for the complete list of solved issues and merged PRs.

Enhancements

• Support custom initializers in NStepRNN (#8489)
• Support n_step_gru function on exporting ONNX (#8492, thanks @msakai!)
• Extend ONNX-Chainer's TransposeSequence converter to support more cases (#8493, thanks @msakai!)
• Add NStepGRU link converter example to ONNX-Chainer test (#8494, thanks @msakai!)
• Allow ONNX-Chainer's patch_functions to patch functions in modules other than chainer.functions (#8495, thanks @msakai!)
• Replaced n_fold with n_folds (#8516, thanks @Saanidhyavats!)
• Remove trailing whitespaces (#8536)

Performance Improvements

• Fast IndexIterator for ChainerX CUDA (#8360)

Bug Fixes

• Fix CooMatrix.to_dense for duplicate indices (#8187)
• Add try/finally block to yield in reporter.py (#8508)

Documentation

• Fix several documentation errors in chainer.functions.rnn.* (#8454, thanks @msakai!)
• Fix typo: chainermn.extension -> chainermn.extensions (#8526, thanks @msakai!)
• Remove '--pre' from 'pip install' commands in ChainerX installation document (#8527, thanks @msakai!)

Installation

• Do not install chainer>=7.0.0 in python2 (#8517, thanks @knorth55!)

Tests

• Add chainerx test in observation_aggregator (#8384)
• Fix flaky TestZeta (#8514)
• Fix flaky test: TestCholesky (#8520)
• Skip chainerx.fromfile test when dtype is bool_ and mode is text (#8521)
• Use FunctionTestCase to test F.decov (#8522)

This is the release note of v6.7.0. See here for the complete list of solved issues and merged PRs.

As announced previously, this is the final release of v6 series, which is the last version supporting Python 2.

Bug Fixes

• Add try/finally block to yield in reporter.py (#8511)

Documentation

• Fix several documentation errors in chainer.functions.rnn.* (#8530, thanks @msakai!)

Tests

• Use FunctionTestCase to test F.decov (#8523)
• Skip chainerx.fromfile test when dtype is bool_ and mode is text (#8524)

This is the release note of v7.0.0. See here for the complete list of solved issues and merged PRs.

This release note only covers the difference from v7.0.0rc1; for all highlights and changes, please refer to the release notes of the pre-releases:

• alpha1
• beta1
• beta2
• beta3
• beta4
• RC1

See the Upgrade Guide if you are upgrading from previous versions. Also, note that we dropped the support of Python 2.7 and 3.4 from Chainer v7.

Please read the following announcement to learn about the future of Chainer.

Highlights

• Most features of Chainer, including ChainerMN, are now compatible with ChainerX ndarray.
• ONNX-Chainer is integrated into Chainer.
• NHWC support added. Performance for convolutions and batch normalization greatly improved on GPUs with Tensor Core.

Changes without compatibility

• Forbid out-of-range insert on Sequence (#6374)
• Update minimum required python version to 3.5.2 (#8410)

New Features

• Support soft target in softmax_cross_entropy (#5595, thanks @anaruse!)
• Support NHWC tensor layout (#7620)
• Add Cholesky Decompostion (#8202, thanks @UmashankarTriforce!)
• Allow customizing setup/tear-down method names in testing.fix_random (#8432)

Enhancements

• Use intermediate dtype in F.mean_absolute_error for FP16 (#6807)
• Avoid fallback for ChainerX in F.accuracy (#7396)
• Add from_params to Linear & Conv (#7525, thanks @crcrpar!)
• Correct FunctionNode.forward output type message (#7655)
• Default index mode for ChainerX Take (#8281)
• Forward chainerx::MakeArray in some case (#8296)
• Raise ValueError when calling xxx_obj with ChainerX array in ChainerMN (#8320)
• Add Permutate exporter to onnx_chainer (#8333, thanks @msakai!)
• Update ONNX version (#8339)
• Support ONNX export with opset11 (#8341)
• Support multiple advanced indexing on ONNX export (#8345)
• Revert output value check in SoftmaxCrossEntropy (#8347)
• Enhance chainerx::AddAt as a public function (#8351)
• Support cover_all=True on Unpooling2D in exporting to ONNX (#8391)
• Use ceiling_mode on exporting to ONNX MaxPool (#8392)
• Fix onnx_chainer.replace_func.fake_as_funcnode to reconstruct return value structure (#8398, thanks @msakai!)
• Support Rollaxis in ONNX-Chainer (#8428, thanks @tkanmae!)
• Add support of SelectItem in ONNX-Chainer (#8450, thanks @tkanmae!)
• Add TransposeSequence exporter to ONNX-Chainer (#8451, thanks @msakai!)
• Use __name__ attribute in parameterized test names when available (#8455, thanks @grlee77!)
• SelectItem using GatherElements for ONNX opset>=11 (#8470)
• Add deprecation warning to ONNX exporting without test cases (#8473)
• Add workaround for cuSolver 10.2's new enums (#8475)
• Support step slicing on ONNX export (#8484)
• Support sign function on exporting ONNX (#8488)
• Raise RuntimeError when using cudnn_fast without cudnn (#8499)

Performance Improvements

• Make contiguous case for chainerx::AddAt faster (#8299)

Bug Fixes

• Fix 'attempting to reference a deleted function' with MSVC (#8258, thanks @cloudhan!)
• Fix onnx_chainer's exporter of Separate to handle single output case (#8332, thanks @msakai!)
• Fix ChainerX fallback condition in batch normalization (#8359)
• Remove host-side branch on F.accuracy with ignore_label (#8364, thanks @y1r!)
• Fix rounding on float16 conversions (#8378)
• Avoid overflow on index calculations when using large arrays (#8389)
• Fix pickling of optimizers (#8394)
• Fix AttributeError in WrappedFunctionNode.forward (#8397, thanks @msakai!)
• Register uninitialized persistents (#8445)
• Fix ONNX-Chainer's GetItem converter to handle -1 correctly (#8460, thanks @msakai!)
• Support chainerx.batch_norm with 2D input on CUDA (#8464)
• Fix BatchNormalization for NHWC without cudnn (#8497)

Code Fixes

• Code clean up for routines/indexing.h (#8288)
• Fix style in _snapshot.py (#8297)
• C++ cosmetic fixes (#8379)
• Avoid using VariableNode in F.convolution_2d backward implementation (#8395)
• Add unsigned suffix in float16 test (#8408)
• Remove unused function (#8413)
• Add unsigned integer suffix (#8414)
• Avoid repeatedly enumerating submodules (#8421)
• Fix ChainerX CMake test dependencies (#8422)
• Avoid preprocessor for LAPACK error (#8468)

Documentation

• Fix for issue #6251 and issue #6810 (#6808, thanks @euler16!)
• Document properties of computed gradients in cholesky and eigh (#8312)
• Fix n-step RNN docs (#8326, thanks @euler16)
• Fix documentation of NStepGRUBase (#8330, thanks @msakai!)
• Fix typos in ONNX-Chainer introduction (#8334, thanks @msakai!)
• Fix docs of ONNX export introduction (#8338)
• Fix typo in /examples/seq2seq/README.md (#8399, thanks @tanaken0515!)
• Link to examples directory for the current branch (#8403)
• Fix scatter_dataset part of ChainerMN tutorial (#8406)
• Update expected messages of type_check errors (#8407)
• Fix typo in math expressions (#8433)
• Update requirements (#8501)

Installation

• Allow multiple code in CHAINERX_NVCC_GENERATE_CODE (#8370)
• Fix CMake target name for abseil (#8380)
• Remove typing requirement (#8383, thanks @jonringer!)
• Update minimum required python version to 3.5.2 (#8410)
• Use PYBIND11_EXPORT instead of visibility hack (#8437)
• Ignore unused function warning in NVCC (#8439)
• Fix code grouping in CMakeLists.txt (#8440)

Examples

• Add MNIST MultiprocessParallelUpdater example (#7478)
• Use ChainerX softmax cross entropy implementation in ChainerX examples (#8294)

Tests

• Forbid out-of-range insert on Sequence (#6374)
• Check output in example tests (#7280)
• Show pytest summary in flexCI (#8212)
• Run example tests in Travis CI (#8251)
• Fix Decorrelated Batch Normalization tests (#8260)
• Build ChainerX example in CI (#8282)
• Fix test_Meshgrid (#8285)
• Add ChainerX pytest in multi_node_early_stopping (#8321)
• Fix inputs of pooling function tests (#8328)
• Include .git in ChainerCV compatibility CI (#8331)
• Adjust SoftmaxCrossEntropy test tolerances (#8335)
• Fix random condition in chainerx.where test (#8342)
• Use LinkTestCase for L.GroupNormalization (#8343)
• Relax tolerances of ChainerX linalg forward tests (#8344)
• Add chainerx test to dataset_tests (#8346)
• Print installed packages in pytest (#8348)
• Reduce shape in ChainerX linalg test (#8349)
• Use different docker image for each base development branch (#8350)
• Set CHAINER_CI in Travis CI (#8353)
• Set CHAINER_CI in ChainerX tests in Jenkins (#8354)
• Set CHAINER_CI in Chainer tests in FlexCI (#8356)
• Use xpytest to parallelize tests (#8361)
• Relax float16 forward tolerance of F.cast test (#8363)
• Print actual array values in FunctionTest modified input error (#8367)
• Fix negative tests for chainerx.linalg.* (#8371)
• Avoid non-differential point in TestTriplet (#8376)
• Check ONNX Chainer python styles (#8400)
• Change version of python in travis macos test (#8405)
• Remove chainerx dependency from test backends (#8409)
• Add ChainerX test to test_allreduce_persistent.py (#8412)
• Use fix_random in xfail backward tests (#8419)
• Fix TestMeshgrid (#8420)
• Add ChainerMN and ONNX-chainer tests to Mergify requirements (#8424)
• Add chainerx tests to test_checkpoint.py (#8429)
• Fix random in ChainerX n-step GRU test (#8431)
• Add chainerx tests to test_create_mnbn_model (#8435)
• Add chainerx tests into multi_node_optimizer (#8436)
• Annotate tests that usually run >30s (#8443)
• Lookup macOS undefined symbols at runtime in backend tests (#8448)
• Skip some Convolution2D tests for older numpy versions (#8458)
• Add parametrize_device_name to setup.cfg (#8459)
• Fix conflict between #8251 and #8361 (#8461)
• Fix example test data (#8463)
• Enable verbose flag when installing chainer in Jenkins (#8467)
• Remove ChainerX F.cholesky test (#8469)
• Ignore cupy.util.PerformanceWarning in pytest (#8471)
• Avoid ChainerX slow tests in Jenkins (#8472)
• Fix flaky test of _modified_xlogx (#8483)
• Fix broken version specification in FlexCI dockerfile (#8485)
• Remove unnecessary export on ONNX replace function test (#8487)
• Allow array_utils.uniform to be deterministic with fix_random by default (#8491)
• Add error message for invalid base branch in pfnCI (#8496)
• Adjust timeout and build memory usage in FlexCI (#8498)