Release Notes – Release 1.0.0¶

Key Features and Enhancements¶

[pyTorch] Expanded the support for different layouts in DotProductAttention.
[pyTorch] Added support for packed input for the FlashAttention backend of DotProductAttention.
[pyTorch] Better support for the KV cache during inference via the new InferenceParams class
[pyTorch] Better support for parallel state handling for model parallelism via the new CUDARNGStatesTracker class
[pyTorch] Added an experimental support for the FP8 Tensor type and a new context manager fp8_model_init. When enabled, Transformer Engine modules created inside this fp8_model_init region will hold only FP8 copies of its parameters, as opposed to the default behavior where both higher precision and FP8 copies are present. This may result in lower memory consumption and is especially useful for scenarios like:
- full model training using optimizer with master weights, where the high precision copies of weights are already present in the optimizer.
- inference, where only the FP8 copies of the parameters are used.
- LoRA-like fine-tuning, where the main parameters of the model do not change.
[JAX] Added an ability to set dropout rate for the activation output in LayerNormMLP.
[Paddle] Added documentation.

[pyTorch] Multiple fixes for activation recomputation when using FP8.
[pyTorch] Multiple fixes specific to the usage of Transformer Engine by Megatron-LM and NeMo.
[pyTorch] Fixed a crash occuring when trying to use LayerNormLinear with the return_layernorm_output option set.
[pyTorch] Fixes to the ONNX esport of the attention layer.
[pyTorch] Fixed a crash happening when using RoPE.
[JAX] Fixed a crash occuring in some cases when using cross attention with FSDP.
[JAX] Fixed the wrong handling of the FP8 scaling factor.

FlashAttention v2, which is a dependency of this release of Transformer Engine, has a known issue with excessive memory usage during installation (https://github.com/Dao-AILab/flash-attention/issues/358). One could workaround this issue by either setting the MAX_JOBS=1 environment variable during Transformer Engine installation or installing FlashAttention v1 (e.g. by pip install flash-attn==1.0.9) before attempting to install Transformer Engine.
[pyTorch] In some cases passing the non-contiguous tensors as Q, K or V to DotProductAttention may result in an error “Exception: The provided qkv memory layout is not supported!” It will be fixed in a future release. In the meantime, the workaround is to call .contiguous() on those tensors before passing them to DotProductAttention.

The experimental support for TensorFlow has been removed.
[pyTorch] The deprecated TransformerLayer arguments attention_softmax_in_fp32 and apply_query_key_layer_scaling were removed.
[pyTorch] Deprecated argument skip_weight_param_allocation in the Linear and LayerNormLinear API has been removed. Consequently, the weight and bias arguments in the forward method of those APIs have also been removed.
[pyTorch] Support for loading old/deprecated checkpoint formats where the extra states for FP8 are not serialized into BytesIO or torch.Tensor objects has been removed.
[JAX] Deprecated modules and functions DenseGeneral, LayerNorm, LayerNormDenseGeneral, LayerNormMLP, TransformerEngineBase, extend_logical_axis_rules, MultiHeadAttention, RelativePositionBiases, TransformerLayer, and TransformerLayerType have been removed from transformer_engine.jax and must now only be imported from transformer_engine.jax.flax.