- Add copy() method to Module. This is a user-friendly version of the internal clone() method with better defaults for common use cases.
- NOTE: Remember to bump version number to 0.8.0
- Report forward and backward pass FLOPs of modules and submodules in
linen.Module.tabulate
andsummary.tabulate
(in newflops
andvjp_flops
table columns). Passcompute_flops=True
and/orcompute_vjp_flops=True
to include these columns. - Re-factored
MultiHeadDotProductAttention
's call method signature, by addinginputs_k
andinputs_v
args and switchinginputs_kv
,mask
anddetermistic
to keyword arguments. See more details in #3389. - Use new typed PRNG keys throughout flax: this essentially involved changing
uses of
jax.random.PRNGKey
tojax.random.key
. (See JEP 9263 for details). If you notice dispatch performance regressions after this change, be sure you updatejax
to version 0.4.16 or newer. - Added
has_improved
field to EarlyStopping and changed the return signature ofEarlyStopping.update
from returning a tuple to returning just the updated class. See more details in #3385
New features:
- Add QK-normalization to MultiHeadDotProductAttention
- Allow apply's method argument to accept submodules
- Add module path to nn.module.
- [JAX] Generate new type of PRNG keys
Bug fixes:
- Directly call original method if method interceptor stack is empty.
- fix stackoverflow when loading pickled module
- Improve kw_only_dataclass.
- Allow pass-through implementation of state dict
- Promote dot_general injections from a function to a module.
New features:
- make
flax.core.copy
add_or_replace
optional - Add
use_fast_variance
option toGroupNorm
andBatchNorm
to allow disabling it.
Bug fixes:
- Use
field_specifiers
instead offield_descriptors
in@dataclass_transform
. - Fix
nn.Module
typing. - [JAX] Replace uses of
jax.experimental.pjit.with_sharding_constraint
withjax.lax.with_sharding_constraint
.
Breaking changes:
- Migrating Flax from returning FrozenDicts to returning regular dicts. More details can be found in this announcement
New features:
- Use pyink
- added dict migration guide to index
- add scan over layers section
- Expose options to customize rich.Table
- add support for initializing carry variables in scan
- Let Flax-Orbax to not port the shape of
target
arrays when they port thetarget
shardings.
Bug fixes:
- Use import
orbax.checkpoint
which is a better import pattern. - Use import
orbax.checkpoint as ocp
to avoid the verbosity of using 'orbax.checkpoint` every time. - [linen] Add alternative, more numerically stable, variance calculation to
LayerNorm
. - [linen] Minor cleanup to normalization code.
- Fix norm calculation bug for 0-rank arrays.
- [JAX] Remove references to jax.config.jax_array.
- [linen] Use
stack
instead ofconcatenate
incompute_stats
, to handle scalar stats case. - [linen] More minor cleanup in normalization
compute_stats
. - Fix warnings from atari gym.
- Refactor TypeHandler to operate over batches of values, rather than individual ones. This allows more flexibility for implementations that may operate more efficiently on batches.
- Fix carry slice logic
- make flax_basics guide use utility fns
- Fix checkpointing guide error at head
- Improve scan docs
- RNNCellBase refactor.
- Set Orbax-as-backend to be the default checkpointing method.
- Fix setup trigger issue under sharing and transforms.
- Add collection to self.scope.reserve(name, col) so that sow works with the same name in different collections.
- Minor improvements for Sequential.
- Improve the error message in MultiHeadDotProductAttention.
- Allow manually specifying the rng key for Dropout.
- RNN refactor.
- fixed missing separator for rng fold in.
- Rudimentary quantization support: some layers can be parametrized with custom dot_general and conv_general_dilated.
- Depend on
orbax-checkpoint
package instead oforbax
. - Refactored setup scripts to
project.toml
. - Added pretty_repr utility fn.
- Fix get_partition_spec on replicated array.
- Updates imagenet.ipynb to use GPU Colab runtime, and fixed config.
- Upgrade checkpointing code to
jax.sharding
, and with more warnings.
- The automatic checkpoint migration was temporarily rolled back due to legacy compatibility issues.
- We still recommend you to use the upgrade guide and migrate completely to the Orbax API to ensure stability.
- Or alternatively, add
flax.config.update('flax_use_orbax_checkpointing', True)
to your project to avoid being impacted by the automatic migration process.
- Added utility functions to frozen_dict api.
- Migrated Flax away from
register_keypaths
. - Fixes kwargs in convert_to_graphs_tuple_fn.
- Fixed examples in a few ways:
- Bumped the TF version
- Used latest checkpoint formats
- Other misc fixes.
- New checkpoints will be saved using Orbax! Please check out upgrade guide and consider migrating completely to the Orbax API.
- You could
flax.config.update('flax_use_orbax_checkpointing', False)
to temporarily disable this migration, but note that Flax legacy checkpointing will be removed 3 months from Mar 10, 2023.
- You could
- Migrating
FrozenDict
to regular dict: utility functions now work on both. - Migrated Flax dataclass and
FrozenDict
to JAX pytree keypath API. - Fixed pytype and improved typing for
Module
- Fixed up uses of PyTree and PyTreeDef types.
- 0.6.5 was yanked so this release contains all that was in 0.6.5 as well.
- Migrated regular dict to FrozenDict, currently controlled by a flag.
- Refactored and separate out name relaxation policy changes.
- Added RMS normalization layer.
- Added logical partitioning helpers for using pjit with Flax.
- Add
Module.lazy_init
to avoid compute during Module initialization.
New features:
- Our ReadTheDoc site is a lot more organized now! More improvements on the way.
- Flax auto-SPMD parallelism API to work seamlessly with
jax.pjit
: https://flax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guides/flax_on_pjit.html - Added new
zeros_init
andones_init
initializers. - Adds standardize initializer.
- Allowed specifying method as a string.
- Allowed runtime overwrite of
flax.config
flags.
Bug fixes:
- Added missing
dataclass.fields
from__repr__
. - Renamed ConvLSTM to ConvLSTMCell.
- Fix some tiny inconsistencies between scope.py and module.py.
- Improved many many docstrings, comments and error messages.
New features:
- Flax checkpointing now uses Orbax for more flexiblity and features.
- Added support for python 3.10 and removed support for 3.7.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed rng generation in DenseGeneral init.
- Improved support for Mac M1 chip.
- Bumped package versions for a bunch of examples.
- Improved many docstrings and error messages.
New features:
- Add rng_collection argument to Dropout.
- Fix flax.linen.stochastic.Dropout.
- Add flag allow_partial_mpa_restoration in checkpointing.
- Use
gfile.remove
for files because it doesn't work on GCS files. - Added guides for: Flax the Sharp Bits, Checkpointing, Extracting Gradients
- Improved existed documentation pages.
- Improved errors, error messages and tests.
- Removed codebase's trailing whitespaces.
Bug fixes:
- Fixes launch_gce.sh with imagenet example.
- Properly report AttributeErrors from descriptors.
- Fixes usages of
pmap
. - Return None if no _parent_ref is set.
- Cap dynamic scale to float32 max.
- no-op when double wrapping with struct.dataclass.
- Allow variable_with_axes to have empty axes when axes is set to an empty tuple.
- Don't create reference cycles among Modules.
- Adds axis_name and axis_index_groups to LayerNorm and GroupNorm. by @copybara-service in #2402
- Plumb spmd_axis_name through transforms.vmap through to JAX vmap by @copybara-service in #2398
- Support multiple inputs in flax lifted vjp/custom_vjp by @copybara-service in #2399
- Improve tabulate by @cgarciae in #2316
- Add path_aware_map function by @cgarciae in #2371
- Add static_argnums to nn.checkpoint by @cgarciae in #2457
- Adding "count_include_pad" argument to flax.linen.pooling.avg_pool by @dslisleedh in #2451
- Add perturb() to allow capturing intermediate gradients by @IvyZX in #2476
- Removed deprecated optimizers in
flax.optim
package. - Moved
flax.optim.dynamic_scale
toflax.training.dynamic_scale
. - Switched to using
jax.named_scope
for all profile naming, cut some pointless stack traces out.
New features:
- Added
nn.switch
as a lifted version ofjax.lax.switch
. - Added a method for detecting the use of "init" functions.
- Added checkpointing support for
jax.experimental.GlobalDeviceArray
, a useful array type for multiprocess/multihost computing. - Added async option to
save_checkpoints()
on single-process scenario. - Improved documentation pages.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed variable aliasing in put_variable
- Fixed missing passthrough of nn.scan unroll arg
- Fixed the MNIST example
- Fixes missing PyYAML dependency.
New features:
- Added
nn.tabulate
andModule.tabulate
to generate rich representations of the network structure.
- Added
flax.jax_utils.ad_shard_unpad()
by @lucasb-eyer - Implemented default dtype FLIP. This means the default dtype is now inferred from inputs and params rather than being hard-coded to float32. This is especially useful for dealing with complex numbers because the standard Modules will no longer truncate complex numbers to their real component by default. Instead the complex dtype is preserved by default.
Bug fixes:
- Fix support for JAX's experimental_name_stack.
Breaking changes:
- In rare cases the dtype of a layer can change due to default dtype FLIP. See the "Backward compatibility" section of the proposal for more information.
New features:
- Add lifted conditional
nn.cond
. - Improved error messages: parameters not found, loading checkpoints.
- Replace
jax.tree_multimap
(deprecated) withjax.tree_map
. - Add the "Module Lifecycle" design note.
- Add support for JAX dynamic stack-based named_call
Bug fixes:
- Handle rate==1.0 edgecase in Dropout.
- Fix bug where Linen Module state is reused.
- Bug fixes and generalizations of nn.partitioning API.
New features:
- Added locally-connected (unshared CNN) layer
flax.linen.ConvLocal
. - Improved seq2seq example: Factored our model and input pipeline code.
- Added Optax update guide and deprecated
flax.optim
. - Added
sep
argument toflax.traverse_util.flatten_dict()
. - Implemented Sequential module, in
flax.linen.combinators
.
Breaking changes:
- flax.deprecated.nn is removed. Please pin to flax==0.3.6 if you are still using it.
- PixelCNN++ example is removed. It was not working well on TPU.
- linen Normalization layers no longer downcast double and complex floats tofloat32 when computing the mean and variance.
New features:
- Added
flax.linen.custom_vjp
for custom derivatives inside aModule
. - Add
param_dtype
attribute to standard Linen Modules for specifying parameter dtypes.
Breaking changes:
- Move
flax.nn
toflax.deprecated.nn
.
New features:
- Add experimental checkpoint policy argument. See
flax.linen.checkpoint
- Add lifted versions of jvp and vjp.
- Add lifted transformation for mapping variables. See
flax.linen.map_variables
.
Breaking changes:
- You can no longer pass an int as the
kernel_size
for a `flax.linen.Conv. Instead a type error is raised stating that a tuple/list should be provided. Stride and dilation arguments do support broadcasting a single int value now because this is not ambigious when the kernel rank is known. flax.linen.enable_named_call
andflax.linen.disable_named_call
now work anywhere instead of only affecting Modules constructed after the enable/disable call. Additionally, there is nowflax.linen.override_named_call
that provided a context manager to locally disable/enable named_call.- NamedTuples are no longer converted to tuples on assignment to a
linen.Module
.
New features:
- Flax internal stack frames are now removed from exception state traces.
- Added
flax.linen.nowrap
to decorate method that should not be transformed because they are stateful. - Flax no longer uses implicit rank broadcasting. Thus, you can now use Flax with
--jax_numpy_rank_promotion=raise
.
Bugfixes:
- linen Modules and dataclasses made with
flax.struct.dataclass
orflax.struct.PyTreeNode
are now correctly recognized as dataclasses by static analysis tools like PyLance. Autocomplete of constructors has been verified to work with VSCode. - Fixed a bug in FrozenDict which didn't allow copying dicts with reserved names.
- Fix the serialization of named tuples. Tuple fields are no longer stored in the state dict and the named tuple class is no longer recreated (bug).
- Mixed precision training with float16 now works correctly with the attention layers.
- auto-generated linen Module
__hash__
,__eq__
,__repr__
no longer fail by default on non-init attributes.
Possibly breaking changes:
- When calling
init
the 'intermediates' collection is no longer mutable. Therefore, intermediates will no longer be returned from initialization by default. - Don't update batch statistics during initialization.
- When not using any non-determinism (e.g., dropout), it is not longer necessary to specify the
deterministic
argument inMultiHeadDotProductAttention
.
Other changes:
- Rewrote various examples to use Optax instead of Flax optimizers (e.g., Imagenet, SST2).
- Added an NLP text classification example (on the SST-2 dataset) to
examples/sst2
. that uses a bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) to encode the input text. - Added
flax.training.train_state
to simplify using Optax optimizers. mutable
argument is now available onModule.init
andModule.init_with_outputs
- Bug fix: Correctly handle non-default parameters of Linen Modules with nested inheritance.
- Expose
dot_product_attention_weights
, allowing access to attention weights. BatchNorm
instances will behave correctly during init when called multiple times.- Added a more extensive "how to contribute" guide in
contributing.md
. - Add proper cache behavior for
lift.jit
, fixing cache misses. - Fix bug in Embed layer: make sure it behaves correctly when embedding is np.array.
- Fix
linen.Module
for deep inheritance chains. - Fix bug in DenseGeneral: correctly expand bias to account for batch & noncontracting dimensions.
- Allow Flax lifted transforms to work on partially applied Modules.
- Make
MultiOptimizer
useapply_gradient
instead ofapply_param_gradient
.
Possible breaking changes:
- Bug Fix: Disallow modifying attributes in Modules after they are initialized.
- Raise an error when saving a checkpoint which has a smaller step than the latest checkpoint already saved.
- MultiOptimizer now rejects the case where multiple sub optimizers update the same parameter.
Other changes:
- Added custom error classes to many Linen errors. See: https://flax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/flax.errors.html
- Adds
Module.bind
for binding variables and RNGs to an interactive Module. - Adds
nn.apply
andnn.init
for transforming arbitrary functions that take alinen.Module
as their first argument. - Add option to overwrite existing checkpoints in
save_checkpoint
. - Remove JAX omnistaging check for forward compatibility.
- Pathlib compatibility for checkpoint paths.
is_leaf
argument intraverse_util.flatten_dict
flax.nn
deprecation message no longer appears if you import flax directly.
NOTE: You must now explicitly import flax.nn
if you want to use the old
pre-Linen flax.nn.Module
.
Many improvements to Linen, and the old flax.nn
is officially deprecated!
Notably, there's a clean API for extracting intermediates from modules
defined using @nn.compact
, a more ergonomic API for using Batch Norm and Dropout in modules
defined using setup
, support for MultiOptimizer
with Linen, and multiple safety, performance
and error message improvements.
Possible breaking changes:
- Call setup lazily. See #938 for motivation and more details.
- Linen
Module
instances are now frozen aftersetup
has been called. Previously mutations after setup could be dropped silently. Now the stateless requirement is enforced by raising a TypeError in__setattr__
aftersetup
. - Pytrees of dicts and lists are transformed into FrozenDict and tuples during attribute assignment. This avoids undetected submodules and inner state.
- Bug Fix
flax.core.apply
andModule.apply
. Now it returns a tuple containing the output and a frozen empty collection whenmutable
is specified as an empty list. broadcast_dims
is now an attribute toDropout
instead of a__call__
argument.use_running_average
anddeterministic
no longer have a default. They should be passed explicitly- Bug Fix
Scope.variable
mutability check, before a variable could only be initialized if the 'params' collection was mutable.
Other Improvements:
- Re-introduced the
lm1b
language modeling example - Recognizes batch free inputs in pooling layers. (for use with vmap)
- Add Adadelta optimizer
- Fully deprecate all "pre-Linen"
flax.nn
classes and methods. - Some Module arguments can now be passed either as dataclass attribute or
as argument to
__call__
. See design note - Add
sow
method toModule
andcapture_intermediates
argument toModule.apply
. See howto for usage patterns. - Support passing in modules directly as attributes to other modules, and deal with them correctly both in top-level modules and in submodules.
- Don't require the
variable
argument toModule.apply
to be a FrozenDict - Add support for dict/FrozenDict when using
ModelParamTraversal
As a resultMultiOptimizer
can be used properly with linen modules. - Added OptimizedLSTM: ~33% faster than the original LSTM when using <=1024 units
- Fix dtype handling for Adam and LAMB optimizers in 64bit mode.
- Added
is_mutable()
method toVariable
andis_mutable_collection()
toflax.linen.Module
. - Add
axis_name
arg toflax.linen.vmap
- Enable broadcast in
flax.linen.scan
- Fix behavior when inner module classes were defined in another module
- Add automatic giant array chunking in msgpack checkpoints.
- Log info message when a checkpoint is not found in the directory.
Linen is now out of Alpha (flax.nn is being deprecated)!
flax.core.apply
and linenModule.apply
will now only return the variables collections that were specified as mutable.- Fixed handling of multiple separate subclasses of a Module.
- We now allow assignment of mixed Module pytrees in setup.
- Refactored collection creation to fail early when modifying an undefined collection as before an non-existing non-mutable collection would just be silently ignored.
- Added the silu activation function.
- Add offset argument to Adafactor optimizer for fine-tuning schedules.
- Relaxed limit on calling methods on unbound modules.
- Relaxed parameter attribute check
- Added centered version of RMSProp.
- Added GCE getting started kit.
- Renamed -gpu_type to -accelerator_type.
- Fixed bug in MultiOptimizer causing it to throw away empty dictionary
- Made FrozenDict constructor freeze correctly.
- Made freeze a synonym of the FrozenDict constructor
- Optimize freezing FrozenDicts by sharing immutable internal state.
- We simplified setattr handling of trees with Modules.
- Minor improvements in dtype handling, broadcast option for dropout.
- Added a dtype specification to Embed layer, made Adafactor use float32 state consistently, and added a broadcasting option to the Dropout layer.
- Improved frozen dict performance.
- (Massive) docs improvements
- End to end benchmarks added.
- Examples were updated to Linen.
- Added Reinforcement Learning example (examples/ppo).
- Fix Adafactor bug that prevented factorization.
- Fix scan broadcast issue in functional core.
- Fix initialization RNGs to work with omnistaging for jitted inits.
- Replaces usage of 'param' kind to 'params' collection.
- Fix LARS optimizer for zero param initialization.
- Added various examples in Linen API. See README.md for more information.
- Full JAX omnistaging compatibility.
- Added JAX trace-level checks for transforms.
- BatchNorm added axis_index_groups for control in parallel training.
- Optimizers broken out into separate directory with base class and implementations.
- traverse_util added flatten_dict and unflatten_dict utility methods for nested dicts.
- Add ConvTranspose Module to nn.linear
- Rename the following optional arguments to nn.linear.Conv:
lhs_dilation
->input_dilation
,rhs_dilation
->kernel_dilation
- Change default layer names from numbers '0', '1', etc. to include the Module class name, e.g. 'Dense_0', 'LayerNorm_1'.