v0.5.0

What’s Changed

• Quick fix to simplify DLRM when there are no continuous features @marcromeyn (#479)
• Move Input-blocks @marcromeyn (#471)
• Fixing the inconsistency when exporting embeddings to cudf DataFrame @gabrielspmoreira (#452)
• Remove the mask variable from the ModelContext @karlhigley (#449)
• Move masking into the FeatureContext @karlhigley (#443)
• Create FeatureContext and pass it to model layers with call_layer @karlhigley (#428)
• Rename "mask schema" to "mask" or "feature mask" @karlhigley (#425)
• Rename BlockContext to ModelContext @karlhigley (#417)
• Create FeatureCollection as a way to pass input features to blocks @karlhigley (#418)
• Added TensorInitializer that can be used to initialize variables/embeddings with pretrained weights @gabrielspmoreira (#357)

⚠ Breaking Changes

• Remove Block.to_model @benfred (#501)
• Moving loss- and metrics-calculation to model instead of the predicti… @marcromeyn (#431)
• Make Model creation explicit @karlhigley (#432)

🐜 Bug Fixes

• Fixes computing metrics each N steps during training and adding regularization_loss metric @gabrielspmoreira (#511)
• Fix to pass shuffle argument to dataloader @benfred (#493)
• fix broken links in the 04-Exporting-ranking-models.ipynb nb @rnyak (#490)
• Fixes errors on retrieval models evaluation in graph mode @gabrielspmoreira (#488)
• Fixes and improvements in ranking metrics @gabrielspmoreira (#475)
• Fixes and improves masking (for both Causal LM and Masked LM) and adds SequenceAggregation.MASKED_MEAN (used by YouTubeDNN) @gabrielspmoreira (#464)
• Replace use of removeprefix function which requires Python 3.9+ @oliverholworthy (#465)
• Parametrize base-model-tests to run in both graph- and eager-mode @marcromeyn (#456)
• Add validation for movielens variant and fix docstring @oliverholworthy (#434)
• Use collections.abc for Sequence import @oliverholworthy (#427)

🚀 Features

• XGBoost - Switch to dask API @oliverholworthy (#466)
• Fixes and improves masking (for both Causal LM and Masked LM) and adds SequenceAggregation.MASKED_MEAN (used by YouTubeDNN) @gabrielspmoreira (#464)
• Moving loss- and metrics-calculation to model instead of the predicti… @marcromeyn (#431)
• XGBoost - Change group_columns to qid_column @oliverholworthy (#462)
• First sketch of XGBoost integration with Merlin Dataset @oliverholworthy (#433)
• Getting rid of feature-variables in ModelContext @marcromeyn (#455)
• Adding the missing logQ correction to sampled softmax @gabrielspmoreira (#457)
• Making YoutubeDNNRetrievalModel more configurable @gabrielspmoreira (#447)
• Making EmbeddingOptions.embedding_dims to have priority over .inferred_embedding_dims @gabrielspmoreira (#398)

📄 Documentation

• Update to refer to merlin-tensorflow container @mikemckiernan (#512)
• Fix prediction task documentation @benfred (#505)
• Fix dataloader docstring @benfred (#492)
• Add common release-drafter workflow @mikemckiernan (#439)
• Add common release-drafter configuration @mikemckiernan (#435)
• Adding container info to notebook 01, 02 and 06 @bschifferer (#424)

🔧 Maintenance

• Fix pytest marker for integration tests. @oliverholworthy (#510)
• Add a GA workflow that requires labels on PR's @benfred (#506)
• Use shared implementation of triage workflow @benfred (#504)
• remove unnecessary line @radekosmulski (#494)
• Adding automatic branch pruning to ParallelBlock @marcromeyn (#477)
• Move tabular tests from test_core to test_tabular @marcromeyn (#476)
• Remove tf.test.is_gpu_available call @benfred (#470)
• Update setup.py to include only the merlin namespace @oliverholworthy (#469)
• Add labels to PRs for change log @mikemckiernan (#453)
• Make use of model_test for all ranking- and benchmark-models @marcromeyn (#440)
• Move tests to tests/unit or tests/integration @jperez999 (#445)
• Creating generic model_test @marcromeyn (#430)
• Create separate a Github-workflow for each backend @marcromeyn (#423)
• rm git pull cmd in test unit @jperez999 (#438)
• Adding CI for notebooks 03, 04, 05 and 06 @bschifferer (#414)