Release notes:

New API

Graph Slice Operation: Introduced the graph.slice operation for slicing input tensors. Refer to docs/operations/Slice.md for detailed documentation and samples/cpp/misc/slice.cpp for a C++ sample. Pybinds for this operation have also been added.
SM Carveout Feature: Added the set_sm_count(int32_t type) graph property to support the SM Carveout feature introduced in Ampere and Hopper GPUs. Engines that do not support SM_COUNT will return NOT_SUPPORTED.

Convolution Mode Attribute: Added the missing set_convolution_mode attribute to convolution attributes in forward propagation (fprop), data gradient (dgrad), and weight gradient (wgrad). Previously, this was hardcoded to CUDNN_CROSS_CORRELATION in the 1.x API.
SDPA FP8 Backward Node: Fixed an issue with the deserialization of the sdpa_fp8_backward node.

Graph Execution Overhead: Reduced the overhead of graph.execute() by optimizing sub-node tree traversal, collected UIDs, workspace modifications, and workspace size.
Graph Validation Performance: Significantly improved (~10x) the performance of graph.validate() by deferring graph expansion to a later stage (build_operation_graph).
Optional Running Stats for BatchNorm: Made the running statistics for the batch normalization operation optional, supported by cuDNN backend version 9.3.0 and later.
Shape and Stride Inferencing: Enhanced shape and stride inferencing to preserve the stride order of the input.
Diagnostic Error Message: Added a diagnostic error message to create_execution_plans if called without the preceding build_operation_graph.
JSON Schema and Deserialization: Improved the JSON schema and deserialization logic with additional checks.
Logging Overhead: Reduced logging overhead, resulting in faster graph.build() calls.
CMake Integration: Replaced CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR with PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR in CMake files for better integration. See the relevant pull request for more details.

Jupyter Notebooks: Added Jupyter notebooks for RMSNorm, InstanceNorm, and LayerNorm. Refer to the samples/python folder for more information.