This patch release fixes a number of identified issues.

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

• Support pickling Scipy optimizers with a non-empty compile cache
• Allow setting a prior for A in the Linear mean function
• Avoid rounding small values in kernel summary printout
• Test against Tensorflow 2.15

Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from:

JSchmiegel, uri-granta

Release 2.9.0

This release adds caching of compiled graphs inside the Scipy optimizer, and adds support for returning loss history. It also adds supports for Python 3.11.

Major Features and Improvements

• Support returning loss history with Scipy optimizer.
• Scipy minimize wrapper caches compiled graphs and re-uses them if called with the same arguments. This functionality can be disabled by setting the new compile_cache_size argument to 0.

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

• Support and test with Python 3.11
• Test against a 'production' environment (in addition to 'min' and 'max' environments).

Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from:

khurram-ghani, jesnie, uri-granta

A small fix to ensure support for (and testing with) TensorFlow 2.12.

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

• Support and test with TensorFlow 2.12

Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from:

uri-granta

The main focus of this release is to provide users control over arguments for tf.function compilation inside the Scipy minimize wrapper. It also adds support for a new categorical kernel.

Major Features and Improvements

• Added a new categorical kernel that implements categorical variables by mapping them to values in a latent space. (#2055)
• Added support for passing tf.function arguments for compilation in gpflow.optimizers.Scipy. (#2064)
• Default lower bound for parameters of scalar likelihoods can now be set via configuration. (#1985, #2066)

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

• Fixed some notebook typos and a link. (#2052, #2057)
• Fixed missing docs for SquaredExponential and Constant kernels. (#2056, #2063)

Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from:

sc336, partev, khurram-ghani, uri-granta, awav, jesnie

A small fix for a bug in the scipy optimize wrapper.

Breaking Changes

• None

Known Caveats

• None

Major Features and Improvements

• None

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

• Patched gpflow.optimizers.Scipy to always assign the last good state returned by scipy.optimize.minimize to the model under optimization. Previously, this step could be missed if minimize failed in some situations, leaving the model in an arbitrary state.

Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from: khurram-ghani

Full Changelog: https://github.com/GPflow/GPflow/compare/v2.6.4...v2.6.5

A small fix for a bug in the scipy optimize wrapper.

Breaking Changes

• None

Known Caveats

• None

Major Features and Improvements

• None

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

• Patched gpflow.optimizers.Scipy to always assign the last good state returned by scipy.optimize.minimize to the model under optimization. Previously, this step could be missed if minimize failed in some situations, leaving the model in an arbitrary state.

Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from: khurram-ghani

Full Changelog: https://github.com/GPflow/GPflow/compare/v2.6.4...v2.6.5

The main theme of this release is documentation, with a new suite of tutorials, several upgrades to notebooks and the removal of a rather annoying bug in the documentation site.

Perhaps more notably, check_shapes has been removed, and can now be found here. This change is breaking for those who are still getting check_shapes from gpflow, although being in experimental this change does not require a new version number.

Breaking Changes

• gpflow.experimental.check_shapes has been removed, in favour of an independent release. Use pip install check_shapes and import check_shapes instead.

Major Features and Improvements

• Major rework of documentation landing page and "getting started" section.

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

• Fixed bug related to tf.saved_model and methods wrapped in @check_shapes.
• Documented monitoring with Adam optimizer.
• Fixed bug related to switching versions in documentation site
• Fixed several issues relating to mypy

Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from:

sc336, st--, sethaxen, jesnie

This is yet another bug-fix release.

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

• Fix to to_default_float to avoid losing precision when called with python floats.

Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from:

ChrisMorter

Release 2.6.3 (next upcoming release in progress)

This is yet another bug-fix release.

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

• Fix to check_shapes handling of tfp..._TensorCoercible.

Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from:

jesnie

Release 2.6.2

This is a bug-fix release, for compatibility with GPflux.

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

• Extract shapes of tfp.python.layers.internal.distribution_tensor_coercible._TensorCoercible.
• Allow FallbackSeparateIndependentInducingVariables to have children with different shapes.
• Allow input and output batches on GaussianQuadrature to be different.

Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from:

jesnie