NNI v2.4 Release

Major Updates

Neural Architecture Search

• NAS visualization: visualize model graph through Netron (#3878)
• Support NAS bench 101/201 on Retiarii framework (#3871 #3920)
• Support hypermodule AutoActivation (#3868)
• Support PyTorch v1.8/v1.9 (#3937)
• Support Hardware-aware NAS with nn-Meter (#3938)
• Enable fixed_arch on Retiarii (#3972)

Model Compression

• Refactor of ModelSpeedup: auto shape/mask inference (#3462)
• Added more examples for ModelSpeedup (#3880)
• Support global sort for Taylor pruning (#3896)
• Support TransformerHeadPruner (#3884)
• Support batch normalization folding in QAT quantizer (#3911, thanks the external contributor @chenbohua3)
• Support post-training observer quantizer (#3915, thanks the external contributor @chenbohua3)
• Support ModelSpeedup for Slim Pruner (#4008)
• Support TensorRT 8.0.0 in ModelSpeedup (#3866)

Hyper-parameter Tuning

• Improve HPO benchmarks (#3925)
• Improve type validation of user defined search space (#3975)

Training service & nnictl

• Support JupyterLab (#3668 #3954)
• Support viewing experiment from experiment folder (#3870)
• Support kubeflow in training service reuse framework (#3919)
• Support viewing trial log on WebUI for an experiment launched in view mode (#3872)

Minor Updates & Bug Fixes

• Fix the failure of the exit of Retiarii experiment (#3899)
• Fix exclude not supported in some config_list cases (#3815)
• Fix bug in remote training service on reuse mode (#3941)
• Improve IP address detection in modern way (#3860)
• Fix bug of the search box on WebUI (#3935)
• Fix bug in url_prefix of WebUI (#4051)
• Support dict format of intermediate on WebUI (#3895)
• Fix bug in openpai training service induced by experiment config v2 (#4027 #4057)
• Improved doc (#3861 #3885 #3966 #4004 #3955)
• Improved the API export_model in model compression (#3968)
• Supported UnSqueeze in ModelSpeedup (#3960)
• Thanks other external contributors: @Markus92 (#3936), @thomasschmied (#3963), @twmht (#3842)