Release 1.8 - 8/27/2020

Major updates

Training service

• Access trial log directly on WebUI (local mode only) (#2718)
• Add OpenPAI trial job detail link (#2703)
• Support GPU scheduler in reusable environment (#2627) (#2769)
• Add timeout for web_channel in trial_runner (#2710)
• Show environment error message in AzureML mode (#2724)
• Add more log information when copying data in OpenPAI mode (#2702)

WebUI, nnictl and nnicli

• Improve hyper-parameter parallel coordinates plot (#2691) (#2759)
• Add pagination for trial job list (#2738) (#2773)
• Enable panel close when clicking overlay region (#2734)
• Remove support for Multiphase on WebUI (#2760)
• Support save and restore experiments (#2750)
• Add intermediate results in export result (#2706)
• Add command to list trial results with highest/lowest metrics (#2747)
• Improve the user experience of nnicli with examples (#2713)

Neural architecture search

• Search space zoo: ENAS and DARTS (#2589)
• API to query intermediate results in NAS benchmark (#2728)

Model compression

• Support the List/Tuple Construct/Unpack operation for TorchModuleGraph (#2609)
• Model speedup improvement: Add support of DenseNet and InceptionV3 (#2719)
• Support the multiple successive tuple unpack operations (#2768)
• Doc of comparing the performance of supported pruners (#2742)
• New pruners: Sensitivity pruner (#2684) and AMC pruner (#2573) (#2786)
• TensorFlow v2 support in model compression (#2755)

Backward incompatible changes

• Update the default experiment folder from $HOME/nni/experiments to $HOME/nni-experiments. If you want to view the experiments created by previous NNI releases, you can move the experiments folders from $HOME/nni/experiments to $HOME/nni-experiments manually. (#2686) (#2753)
• Dropped support for Python 3.5 and scikit-learn 0.20 (#2778) (#2777) (2783) (#2787) (#2788) (#2790)

Others

• Upgrade TensorFlow version in Docker image (#2732) (#2735) (#2720)

Examples

• Remove gpuNum in assessor examples (#2641)

Documentation

• Improve customized tuner documentation (#2628)
• Fix several typos and grammar mistakes in documentation (#2637 #2638, thanks @tomzx)
• Improve AzureML training service documentation (#2631)
• Improve CI of Chinese translation (#2654)
• Improve OpenPAI training service documenation (#2685)
• Improve documentation of community sharing (#2640)
• Add tutorial of Colab support (#2700)
• Improve documentation structure for model compression (#2676)

Bug fixes

• Fix mkdir error in training service (#2673)
• Fix bug when using chmod in remote training service (#2689)
• Fix dependency issue by making _graph_utils imported inline (#2675)
• Fix mask issue in SimulatedAnnealingPruner (#2736)
• Fix intermediate graph zooming issue (#2738)
• Fix issue when dict is unordered when querying NAS benchmark (#2728)
• Fix import issue for gradient selector dataloader iterator (#2690)
• Fix support of adding tens of machines in remote training service (#2725)
• Fix several styling issues in WebUI (#2762 #2737)
• Fix support of unusual types in metrics including NaN and Infinity (#2782)
• Fix nnictl experiment delete (#2791)