Release Notes – Release 1.5¶
Key Features and Enhancements¶
[pyTorch] Added support for non-reentrant mode for activation recompute in the
checkpoint
API.[pyTorch] Added support for rectangular matrices in the unfused softmax backend in order to support speculative decoding.
[pyTorch] Added the inference_params argument to the
DotProductAttention
API to support kv-caching.[JAX] Added the
DotProductAttention
API.[JAX] Expanded RoPE support using the rotary_pos_emb_group_method argument.
[paddle] Added support for RMSNorm.
[paddle] Added support for RoPE.
[paddle] Added support for SwiGLU.
Fixed Issues¶
[pyTorch] Fixed a numerical issue with storing weights in FP8 via the
fp8_model_init
API.
Known Issues in This Release¶
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). You can work around this issue either by setting the environment variable
MAX_JOBS=1
during Transformer Engine installation, or by installing FlashAttention v1 (e.g. by executingpip install flash-attn==1.0.9
) before attempting to install Transformer Engine.[pyTorch] FlashAttention v2.1 changed the behavior of the causal mask when performing cross-attention (see https://github.com/Dao-AILab/flash-attention#21-change-behavior-of-causal-flag for reference). In order for Transformer Engine to keep consistent behavior between versions and backends, FlashAttention is disabled for this use case (cross attention with casual masking) when 2.1+ version of FlashAttention is installed.
Breaking Changes in This Release¶
There are no breaking changes in this release.
Deprecated Features¶
[JAX] The arguments num_heads, dropout_rate, output_layernorm, apply_residual_connection_post_layernorm, and fuse_qkv are deprecated in the
MultiHeadAttention
API. They are replaced respectively with num_attention_heads, attention_dropout, input_layernorm, return_layernorm_output, and fused_qkv_params.FlashAttention v1 is no longer supported in Transformer Engine. The minimum required version is v2.0.6.
Miscellaneous Changes¶
There are no miscellaneous changes in this release.