NNI v2.8 Release

Neural Architecture Search

• Align user experience of one-shot NAS with multi-trial NAS, i.e., users can use one-shot NAS by specifying the corresponding strategy (doc)
• Support multi-GPU training of one-shot NAS
• Preview Support load/retrain the pre-searched model of some search spaces, i.e., 18 models in 4 different search spaces (doc)
• Support AutoFormer search space in search space hub, thanks our collaborators @nbl97 and @penghouwen
• One-shot NAS supports the NAS API repeat and cell
• Refactor of RetiariiExperiment to share the common implementation with HPO experiment
• CGO supports pytorch-lightning 1.6

Model Compression

• Preview Refactor and improvement of automatic model compress with a new CompressionExperiment
• Support customizating module replacement function for unsupported modules in model speedup (doc)
• Support the module replacement function for some user mentioned modules
• Support output_padding for convtranspose2d in model speedup, thanks external contributor @haoshuai-orka

Hyper-Parameter Optimization

• Make config.tuner.name case insensitive
• Allow writing configurations of advisor in tuner format, i.e., aligning the configuration of advisor and tuner

Experiment

• Support launching multiple HPO experiments in one process

• Internal refactors and improvements

  • Refactor of the logging mechanism in NNI
  • Refactor of NNI manager globals for flexible and high extensibility
  • Migrate dispatcher IPC to WebSocket
  • Decouple lock stuffs from experiments manager logic
  • Use launcher's sys.executable to detect Python interpreter

WebUI

• Improve user experience of trial ordering in the overview page
• Fix the update issue in the trial detail page

Documentation

• A new translation framework for document
• Add a new quantization demo (doc)

Notable Bugfixes

• Fix TPE import issue for old metrics
• Fix the issue in TPE nested search space
• Support RecursiveScriptModule in speedup
• Fix the issue of failed "implicit type cast" in merge_parameter()