VowpalWabbit/vowpal_wabbit 8.8.0

on GitHub

• There has significant work in streamlining and improving support for the Python bindings. Thanks @peterychang! (#1928)
• The Conditional Contextual Bandit reduction got merged in, this reduction allows you to express problems where there are multiple slots to fill. See here for the wiki page. (#1816) (#1995) (#2078) (#2141)
• CMake install targets have been added to the build files (#2172) (#2135)
  • Now you can find and link VW easily in other projects:

  find_package(VowpalWabbit REQUIRED)
  add_executable(my_exe main.cpp)
  target_link_libraries(my_exe PRIVATE VowpalWabbit::vw)

• Slim VW got merged into master. This is an experimental lightweight inference runtime that supports a subset of VW features. (#2028)
• Bug fixes! (see all changes below)

Internal improvements

We are at work overhauling and modernizing VW, some of the relevant changes on that front are below:

• Migrate c arrays to std::array (#2094)
• Make hashing constexpr in C++14 and unify rotl impl (#2093)
• Make is_example_header const (#2095)
• Allow constructor arugments for calloc_or_throw (#2070)
• Learner now holds type erased reduction data (#2060)
• Use numeric_limits (#2107)
• Unify throwing of exceptions to use vw_exception instead of bare std:exception (#2171)
• Cb explore adf atomization (#2069)
• Refactor cb_adf reduction (#2057)
• Move cb_sample to be class based (#2087)
• Atomize topk reduction (#2050)
• Atomize autolink reduction (#2047)

Other notable changes:

• --version now includes commit id if available at build time (#1951)
• Macos added as CI target (#1965)
• Allow escaped command lines (#2157)
• Update MSVC Toolchain to v14.1 (#1988)
• Multiinstance mode for multiline examples (#1934)

All Changes