These are the release notes for v5.0.0rc1. See here for the complete list of solved issues and merged PRs.

Highlights

• Many routines, esp. for sampling from various distributions, are added.
• We now support SciPy 1.0+.

New Features

• New sampling routines for various distributions
  • Multivariate normal distribution (#1320)
  • Chi-square distribution (#1414)
  • Gamma distribution (#1416, #1616)
  • Student’s t distribution (#1417)
  • Poisson distribution (#1418)
  • Cauchy distribution (#1419)
  • Exponential distribution (#1420, #1624)
  • F distribution (#1421)
  • Geometric distribution (#1422)
  • Pareto distribution (#1423)
  • von Mises distribution (#1623)
  • Zipf distribution (#1634)
• New routines
  • Add sparse cholesky decomposition (#1075, thanks @chengts95!)
  • Implement round function (#1499)
  • Add cbrt (#1559)
  • Add nan_to_num (#1562)
  • Add erf, erfc, and erfcx to cupyx (#1570)
  • Add ndtr (#1571)
  • Add erfinv and erfcinv (#1590)
• Add new APIs for RNN (#1572)
• Support complex in eigh and svd (#1518, thanks @infrub!)
• Add cupy.cublas.dgetrfBatched (#1608)
• General support for external memory pointer (#1610)
• Add cupy.cublas.dgetriBatched (#1617)

Enhancements

• Improve exception handling performance in Cython (#919)
• Improve cudnn.pyx to up speed (#1378)
• Improve take function (#1505)
• Improve view method performance (#1543)
• Split core.pyx to improve maintainability (#1550)
• Improve memory pool performance (#1544)
• Make ElementwiseKernel emit immutable in_params (#1554)
• Use bit operation when the divisor is a power of 2 on GPU (#1555)
• Use cuBLAS 9.1+ algorithm names (#1561)
• Improve error messages for complex arguments of bessel functions (#1569)
• Support SciPy 1.0+ (#1573)
• Fix result dtypes of special functions (#1577)
• Improve usability of special functions (#1578)
• Improve readability of reduction kernel (only python) (#1580)
• Fallback to synchronous transfer if pinned memory could not be allocated (#1593)
• Unify fusion (#1599)
• Add strides option in cupy.ndarray (#1611)
• Fix laplace distribution (#1645)

Bug Fixes

• Fix invalid exception propagation in getDropoutReserveSpaceSize (#919, #1344)
• Fix CuPy not working in thread other than one imported CuPy (#1581)
• Reset cuda runtime error (#1592)
• Fix cupy.random.standard_exponential bug (#1642)
• Support non-tuple size in random distribution generators (#1648)
• Fix random.exponential (#1649)

Documentation

• Add documentation to sqrt (#1560)
• Add interoperability docs (#1565)
• Fix docstring of modified bessel function (#1567)
• Add comparison table generator (#1582)
• Support cuDNN v7.2 (#1584)
• Update contribution guide to align with Chainer's one (#1604)
• Rename my_sum to my_add in docs (#1612)

Tests

• Import scipy.special to use it in test (#1568)
• Use assertIsNone in test_interpolation.py (#1587)
• Add test for thread use case of fusion (#1589)
• Test reproducibility for any seed (#1613)
• Fix invalid escape sequence warnings in Python 3.6 (#1619)
• Improve boundary tests of erfinv (#1646)

Others

• Fix around style checking (#1605)