Modifications in the trunk since the 0.4.1 release (August 12th, 2011) up to December 5th, 2011


Upgrading to Theano 0.5 is recommended for everyone, but you should first make
sure that your code does not raise deprecation warnings with Theano 0.4.1.
Otherwise, in one case the results can change. In other cases, the warnings are
turned into errors (see below for details).


Important changes:
 * Moved to github: http://github.com/Theano/Theano/
 * Old trac ticket moved to assembla ticket: http://www.assembla.com/spaces/theano/tickets
 * Theano vision: http://deeplearning.net/software/theano/introduction.html#theano-vision (Many people)
 * Theano with GPU works in some cases on Windows now. Still experimental. (Sebastian Urban)
 * See the Interface changes.


Interface Behavior Change (was deprecated and generated a warning since Theano 0.3 released Nov. 23rd, 2010):
    * The current default value of the parameter axis of
      theano.{max,min,argmax,argmin,max_and_argmax} is now the same as
      numpy: None. i.e. operate on all dimensions of the tensor. (Frédéric Bastien, Olivier Delalleau)


Interface Features Removed (most were deprecated):
 * The string modes FAST_RUN_NOGC and STABILIZE are not accepted. They were accepted only by theano.function().
   Use Mode(linker='c|py_nogc') or Mode(optimizer='stabilize') instead.
 * tensor.grad(cost, wrt) now always returns an object of the "same type" as wrt
   (list/tuple/TensorVariable). (Ian Goodfellow, Olivier)
 * A few tag.shape and Join.vec_length left have been removed. (Frederic)
 * The .value attribute of shared variables is removed, use shared.set_value()
   or shared.get_value() instead. (Frederic)
 * Theano config option "home" is not used anymore as it was redundant with "base_compiledir".
   If you use it, Theano will now raise an error. (Olivier D.)
 * scan interface changes: (Razvan Pascanu)
    - The use of `return_steps` for specifying how many entries of the output
      to return has been removed. Instead, apply a subtensor to the output
      returned by scan to select a certain slice.
    - The inner function (that scan receives) should return its outputs and
      updates following this order:
        [outputs], [updates], [condition].
      One can skip any of the three if not used, but the order has to stay unchanged.

Interface bug fixes:
 * Rop in some case should have returned a list of one Theano variable, but returned the variable itself. (Razvan)

New deprecation (will be removed in Theano 0.6, warning generated if you use them):
 * tensor.shared() renamed to tensor._shared(). You probably want to call theano.shared() instead! (Olivier D.)


New features:
 * Adding 1D advanced indexing support to inc_subtensor and set_subtensor (James Bergstra)
 * tensor.{zeros,ones}_like now support the dtype param as numpy (Frederic)
 * Added configuration flag "exception_verbosity" to control the verbosity of exceptions (Ian)
 * theano-cache list: list the content of the theano cache (Frederic)
 * theano-cache unlock: remove the Theano lock (Olivier)
 * tensor.ceil_int_div to compute ceil(a / float(b)) (Frederic)
 * MaxAndArgMax.grad now works with any axis (The op supports only 1 axis) (Frederic)
     * used by tensor.{max,min,max_and_argmax}
 * tensor.{all,any} (Razvan)
 * tensor.roll as numpy: (Matthew Rocklin, David Warde-Farley)
 * Theano with GPU works in some cases on Windows now. Still experimental. (Sebastian Urban)
 * IfElse now allows to have a list/tuple as the result of the if/else branches.
     * They must have the same length and corresponding type (Razvan)
 * Argmax output dtype is now int64 instead of int32. (Olivier)
 * Added the element-wise operation arccos. (Ian)
 * Added sparse dot with dense grad output. (Yann Dauphin)
     * Optimized to Usmm and UsmmCscDense in some case (Yann)
     * Note: theano.dot and theano.sparse.structured_dot() always had a gradient with the same sparsity pattern as the inputs.
       The new theano.sparse.dot() has a dense gradient for all inputs.
 * GpuAdvancedSubtensor1 supports broadcasted dimensions. (Frederic)


New optimizations:
 * AdvancedSubtensor1 reuses preallocated memory if available (scan, c|py_nogc linker) (Frederic)
 * tensor_variable.size (as numpy) computes the product of the shape elements. (Olivier)
 * sparse_variable.size (as scipy) computes the number of stored values. (Olivier)
 * dot22, dot22scalar work with complex. (Frederic)
 * Generate Gemv/Gemm more often. (James)
 * Remove scan when all computations can be moved outside the loop. (Razvan)
 * scan optimization done earlier. This allows other optimizations to be applied. (Frederic, Guillaume, Razvan)
 * exp(x) * sigmoid(-x) is now correctly optimized to the more stable form sigmoid(x). (Olivier)
 * Added Subtensor(Rebroadcast(x)) => Rebroadcast(Subtensor(x)) optimization. (Guillaume)
 * Made the optimization process faster. (James)
 * Allow fusion of elemwise when the scalar op needs support code. (James)
 * Better opt that lifts transpose around dot. (James)


Bug fixes (the result changed):
 * On CPU, if the convolution had received explicit shape information, they where not checked at runtime.
   This caused wrong result if the input shape was not the one expected. (Frederic, reported by Sander Dieleman)
 * Scan grad when the input of scan has sequences of different lengths. (Razvan, reported by Michael Forbes)
 * Scan.infer_shape now works correctly when working with a condition for the number of loops.
   In the past, it returned n_steps as the length, which is not always true. (Razvan)
 * Theoretical bug: in some case we could have GPUSum return bad value.
   We were not able to reproduce this problem
     * patterns affected ({0,1}*nb dim, 0 no reduction on this dim, 1 reduction on this dim):
       01, 011, 0111, 010, 10, 001, 0011, 0101 (Frederic)
 * div by zero in verify_grad. This hid a bug in the grad of Images2Neibs. (James)
 * theano.sandbox.neighbors.Images2Neibs grad was returning a wrong value.
   The grad is now disabled and returns an error. (Frederic)
 * An expression of the form "1 / (exp(x) +- constant)" was systematically matched to "1 / (exp(x) + 1)"
   and turned into a sigmoid regardless of the value of the constant. A warning will be issued if your
   code was affected by this bug. (Olivier, reported by Sander Dieleman)
 * When indexing into a subtensor of negative stride (for instance, x[a:b:-1][c]),
   an optimization replacing it with a direct indexing (x[d]) used an incorrect formula,
   leading to incorrect results. (Pascal)


Crashes fixed:
 * T.mean crash at graph building time. (Ian)
 * "Interactive debugger" crash fix. (Ian, Frederic)
 * Do not call gemm with strides 0, some blas refuse it. (Pascal Lamblin)
 * Optimization crash with gemm and complex. (Frederic)
 * GPU crash with elemwise. (Frederic)
 * Compilation crash with amdlibm and the GPU. (Frederic)
 * IfElse crash. (Frederic)
 * Execution crash fix in AdvancedSubtensor1 on 32 bit computers. (Pascal)
 * GPU compilation crash on MacOS X. (Olivier)
 * Support for OSX Enthought Python Distribution 7.x. (Graham Taylor, Olivier)
 * When the subtensor inputs had 0 dimensions and the outputs 0 dimensions. (Frederic)
 * Crash when the step to subtensor was not 1 in conjunction with some optimization. (Frederic, reported by Olivier Chapelle)
 * fix dot22scalar cast of integer scalars (Justin Bayer, Frédéric, Olivier)


Known bugs:
 * CAReduce with nan in inputs don't return the good output (`Ticket <https://www.assembla.com/spaces/theano/tickets/763>`_).
     * This is used in tensor.{max,mean,prod,sum} and in the grad of PermuteRowElements.
 * If you take the grad of a grad of scan, now we raise an error during the construction of the graph. In the past, you could have wrong results in some cases or an error at run time.
 * Scan can raise an IncSubtensor error at run time (no wrong result possible). The current workaround is to disable an optimization with this Theano flag: "optimizer_excluding=scanOp_save_mem".
   * If you have multiple optimizations to disable, you must separate them with ":".


Sandbox:
 * cvm interface more consistent with current linker. (James)
 * vm linker has a callback parameter. (James)
 * review/finish/doc: diag/extract_diag. (Arnaud Bergeron, Frederic, Olivier)
 * review/finish/doc: AllocDiag/diag. (Arnaud, Frederic, Guillaume)
 * review/finish/doc: MatrixInverse, matrix_inverse. (Razvan)
 * review/finish/doc: matrix_dot. (Razvan)
 * review/finish/doc: det (determinent) op. (Philippe Hamel)
 * review/finish/doc: Cholesky determinent op. (David)
 * review/finish/doc: ensure_sorted_indices. (Li Yao)
 * review/finish/doc: spectral_radius_boud. (Xavier Glorot)
 * review/finish/doc: sparse sum. (Valentin Bisson)


Sandbox New features (not enabled by default):
 * CURAND_RandomStreams for uniform and normal (not picklable, GPU only) (James)


Documentation:
 * Many updates. (Many people)
 * Updates to install doc on MacOS. (Olivier)
 * Updates to install doc on Windows. (David, Olivier)
 * Added how to use scan to loop with a condition as the number of iteration. (Razvan)
 * Added how to wrap in Theano an existing python function (in numpy, scipy, ...). (Frederic)
 * Refactored GPU installation of Theano. (Olivier)


Others:
 * Better error messages in many places. (David, Ian, Frederic, Olivier)
 * PEP8 fixes. (Many people)
 * New min_informative_str() function to print graph. (Ian)
 * Fix catching of exception. (Sometimes we catched interupt) (Frederic, David, Ian, Olivier)
 * Better support for uft string. (David)
 * Fix pydotprint with a function compiled with a ProfileMode (Frederic)
     * Was broken with change to the profiler.
 * Warning when people have old cache entries. (Olivier)
 * More tests for join on the GPU and CPU. (Frederic)
 * Don't request to load the GPU module by default in scan module. (Razvan)
 * Fixed some import problems.
 * Filtering update. (James)
 * On Windows, the default compiledir changed to be local to the computer/user and not transferred with roaming profile. (Sebastian Urban)
 * New theano flag "on_shape_error". Defaults to "warn" (same as previous behavior):
   it prints a warning when an error occurs when inferring the shape of some apply node.
   The other accepted value is "raise" to raise an error when this happens. (Frederic)
 * The buidbot now raises optimization/shape errors instead of just printing a warning. (Frederic)

Reviewers (alphabetical order):
 * David, Frederic, Ian, James, Olivier, Razvan
