Release 2.17.0

TensorFlow

Breaking Changes

• GPU
  • Support for NVIDIA GPUs with compute capability 5.x (Maxwell generation) has been removed from TF binary distributions (Python wheels).

Major Features and Improvements

• Add is_cpu_target_available, which indicates whether or not TensorFlow was built with support for a given CPU target. This can be useful for skipping target-specific tests if a target is not supported.

• tf.data

  • Support data.experimental.distribued_save. distribued_save uses tf.data service (https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/data/experimental/service) to write distributed dataset snapshots. The call is non-blocking and returns without waiting for the snapshot to finish. Setting wait=True to tf.data.Dataset.load allows the snapshots to be read while they are being written.

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

• GPU

  • Support for NVIDIA GPUs with compute capability 8.9 (e.g. L4 & L40) has been added to TF binary distributions (Python wheels).

• Replace DebuggerOptions of TensorFlow Quantizer, and migrate to DebuggerConfig of StableHLO Quantizer.

• Add TensorFlow to StableHLO converter to TensorFlow pip package.

• TensorRT support: this is the last release supporting TensorRT. It will be removed in the next release.

• NumPy 2.0 support: TensorFlow is going to support NumPy 2.0 in the next release. It may break some edge cases of TensorFlow API usage.

• tf.lite

  • Quantization for FullyConnected layer is switched from per-tensor to per-channel scales for dynamic range quantization use case (float32 inputs / outputs and int8 weights). The change enables new quantization schema globally in the converter and inference engine. The new behaviour can be disabled via experimental flag converter._experimental_disable_per_channel_quantization_for_dense_layers = True.
  • C API:
    • The experimental TfLiteRegistrationExternal type has been renamed as TfLiteOperator, and likewise for the corresponding API functions.
  • The Python TF Lite Interpreter bindings now have an option experimental_default_delegate_latest_features to enable all default delegate features.
  • Flatbuffer version update:
    • GetTemporaryPointer() bug fixed.

• tf.data

  • Add wait to tf.data.Dataset.load. If True, for snapshots written with distributed_save, it reads the snapshot while it is being written. For snapshots written with regular save, it waits for the snapshot until it's finished. The default is False for backward compatibility. Users of distributed_save are recommended to set it to True.

• tf.tpu.experimental.embedding.TPUEmbeddingV2

  • Add compute_sparse_core_stats for sparse core users to profile the data with this API to get the max_ids and max_unique_ids. These numbers will be needed to configure the sparse core embedding mid level api.
  • Remove the preprocess_features method since that's no longer needed.

Thanks to our Contributors

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

Abdulaziz Aloqeely, Ahmad-M-Al-Khateeb, Akhil Goel, akhilgoe, Alexander Pivovarov, Amir Samani, Andrew Goodbody, Andrey Portnoy, Ashiq Imran, Ben Olson, Chao, Chase Riley Roberts, Clemens Giuliani, dependabot[bot], Dimitris Vardoulakis, Dragan Mladjenovic, ekuznetsov139, Elfie Guo, Faijul Amin, Gauri1 Deshpande, Georg Stefan Schmid, guozhong.zhuang, Hao Wu, Haoyu (Daniel), Harsha H S, Harsha Hs, Harshit Monish, Ilia Sergachev, Jane Liu, Jaroslav Sevcik, Jinzhe Zeng, Justin Dhillon, Kaixi Hou, Kanvi Khanna, LakshmiKalaKadali, Learning-To-Play, lingzhi98, Lu Teng, Matt Bahr, Max Ren, Meekail Zain, Mmakevic-Amd, mraunak, neverlva, nhatle, Nicola Ferralis, Olli Lupton, Om Thakkar, orangekame3, ourfor, pateldeev, Pearu Peterson, pemeliya, Peng Sun, Philipp Hack, Pratik Joshi, prrathi, rahulbatra85, Raunak, redwrasse, Robert Kalmar, Robin Zhang, RoboSchmied, Ruturaj Vaidya, sachinmuradi, Shawn Wang, Sheng Yang, Surya, Thibaut Goetghebuer-Planchon, Thomas Preud'Homme, tilakrayal, Tj Xu, Trevor Morris, wenchenvincent, Yimei Sun, zahiqbal, Zhu Jianjiang, Zoranjovanovic-Ns