v0.6.0

What’s Changed

⚠ Breaking Changes

• Remove masking for now @marcromeyn (#557)
• Removing Queue-based negative-sampling for now @marcromeyn (#558)

🐜 Bug Fixes

• Add signature checks for various models like two-tower & DLRM @marcromeyn (#588)
• Keep Dataloader lazy when using map operations @oliverholworthy (#572)
• Enable serialization of TensorInitializer @oliverholworthy (#549)
• EmbeddingFeatures - Move embedding table creation from build to init @oliverholworthy (#532)
• Handle ParallelBlock in Model.from_block @oliverholworthy (#517)
• Propagate schema to branches if needed in ParallelBlock @marcromeyn (#478)

🚀 Features

• Hashed cross @Timmy00 (#587)
• Update UniformNegativeSampling to handle targets and add optional control for testing @oliverholworthy (#583)
• Allow for blocks in the Model to transform the targets @marcromeyn (#554)
• Add In-Batch Negative Sampling Block for positive-only batches @oliverholworthy (#560)
• Add functionality to set activation as a list in MLPBlock @rvk007 (#548)
• Add Cond Layer to tensorflow combinators @oliverholworthy (#552)
• Adding AsRaggedTensors transformation @marcromeyn (#556)
• Breaking out BaseModel to support sub-classing @marcromeyn (#518)
• Add new block EmbeddingTable @oliverholworthy (#541)
• Adding pre & post to Model @marcromeyn (#542)
• XGBoost - Add evals argument to fit to support eval on datasets other than training @oliverholworthy (#538)
• XGBoost - Train/eval with features from schema passed in to the constructor @oliverholworthy (#531)
• XGBoost - Use DaskDeviceQuantileDMatrix with GPU Training @oliverholworthy (#528)
• Use standard Keras embedding layers inside EmbeddingFeatures block @karlhigley (#472)
• Refactored top-k metrics and created TopKMetricsAggregator for optimized metrics computation @gabrielspmoreira (#514)

📄 Documentation

• Attribute source of MF image @mikemckiernan (#568)
• add xgboost example @radekosmulski (#522)
• add usecase with pretrained embeddings @radekosmulski (#508)
• Update URLs to Criteo datasets @mikemckiernan (#516)

🔧 Maintenance

• Adding the last 2 major TF versions to our CPU-tests @marcromeyn (#573)
• Add Keras layer_test function to testing_utils @oliverholworthy (#584)
• Attempt to remove docs dependencies @mikemckiernan (#586)
• Integration Tests for Retrieval models @gabrielspmoreira (#537)
• Move data-augmentation transformations into the new data_augmentation package @marcromeyn (#566)
• Moving tf/core/blocks to tf/core @marcromeyn (#565)
• Replace usage of tensorflow.python.keras with tensorflow.keras @oliverholworthy (#555)
• Make blocks part of Model and not of SequentialBlock @marcromeyn (#551)
• Adding schema's to manifest @marcromeyn (#539)
• Add tests for train_metrics_steps ensuring we can control the frequency of computing metrics @oliverholworthy (#519)
• Add tests for calling filter block when output returns empty @oliverholworthy (#481)