1.0.0~alpha2

CHANGES:

We're excited to announce the release of Raven 1.0.0~alpha2! Less than a month after alpha1, this release notably includes contributions from Outreachy applicants in preparation for the upcoming two internships.

Some highlights from this release include:

• NumPy-compatible text I/O with Nx_io.{save,load}_text
• Lots of new functions in Nx/Rune, including neural-net ones dropout, log_softmax, batch_norm, layer_norm, and activation functions like celu and celu, and generic ones like conjugate, index_put, and more.
• Addition of .top libraries for nx, rune, and hugin that auto-install pretty-printers in the OCaml toplevel. You can run e.g. #require "nx.top".
• Addition of a visualization API in Fehu via the new fehu.visualize library, supporting video recording.
• Redesign of Kaun core datastructure and checkpointing subsystem for complete snapshotting.
• Many, many bug fixes and correctness improvements.

We've also made numerous performance improvements across the board:

• Nx elementwise ops: 5–50× faster (e.g., Add 50×50 f32 88.81 µs → 1.83 µs, 48×; Mul 100×100 f32 78.51 µs → 2.41 µs, 33×).
• Nx conv2d: 4–5× faster on common shapes; up to 115× on heavy f64 batched cases (e.g., B16 C64→128 16×16 K3 f64 1.61 s → 13.96 ms).
• Rune autodiff: 1.2–3.7× faster on core grads (e.g., MatMulGrad Medium 34.04 ms → 11.91 ms, 2.86×; Large 190.19 ms → 50.97 ms, 3.73×).
• Talon dataframes: big wins in joins and group-bys (Join 805.35 ms → 26.10 ms, 31×; Group-by 170.80 ms → 19.03 ms, 9×; Filter 9.93 ms → 3.39 ms, 3×).
• Saga tokenizers: realistic workloads 4–17% faster (e.g., WordPiece encode single 136.05 µs → 115.92 µs, 1.17×; BPE batch_32 24.52 ms → 22.27 ms, 1.10×)

We're closing 8 user-reported issues or feature requests and are totalling 30 community contributions from 8 unique contributors.

Nx

• Fix einsum output axis ordering for free axes (e.g., i,jk->jki, ij,klj->kli) by correcting final transpose permutation and intermediate left-axis reordering. (@tmattio)
• Add Nx_io.Cache_dir module with consolidated cache directory utilities respecting RAVEN_CACHE_ROOT, XDG_CACHE_HOME, and HOME fallback, replacing project-specific cache logic across the whole raven ecosystem (#134, @Arsalaan-Alam)
• Add Nx_io.save_txt / Nx_io.load_txt with NumPy-compatible formatting, comments, and dtype support (#120, @six-shot)
• Optimize multi_dot for matrix chains, reducing intermediate allocations and improving performance (@tmattio)
• Add public index_put function for indexed updates (@tmattio)
• Clarify reshape documentation to match its view-only semantics (@tmattio)
• Provide nx.top, rune.top, and hugin.top libraries that auto-install pretty printers in the OCaml toplevel and update Quill to load them (@tmattio)
• Add ifill for explicit in-place fills and make fill return a copied tensor (@tmattio)
• Speed up contiguous elementwise ops via vectorized loops (@tmattio)
• Fast-path contiguous single-axis reductions to avoid iterator fallback (@tmattio)
• Speed up float reductions with contiguous multi-axis fast paths (@tmattio)
• Fast-path padding-free unfold to lower conv2d overhead (@tmattio)
• Move neural-network operations (softmax, log_softmax, relu, gelu, silu, sigmoid, tanh) from Kaun to Nx (@tmattio)
• Add public conjugate function for complex number conjugation (#125, @Arsalaan-Alam)
• Fix complex vdot to conjugate first tensor before multiplication, ensuring correct mathematical behavior (#123, @Arsalaan-Alam)
• Update comparison and conditional operations to use boolean tensors (#115, @nirnayroy)
• Add support for rcond parameter and underdetermined systems to lstsq (#102, @Shocker444)
• Fix matrix_rank/pinv Hermitian fast paths to use eigen-decomposition and match NumPy for complex inputs (#96, @six-shot, @tmattio)
• Optimize matmul BLAS dispatch for strided tensors, improving matrix multiplication performance (@tmattio)
• Fix slow builds reported since alpha1 (#88, @tmattio)
• Fix macOS ARM crash when loading extended bigarray kinds (@tmattio)
• Add float16 and bfloat16 support to safetensors I/O, including precise conversions that preserve denormals/NaNs (#84, @six-shot, @tmattio)
• Refined View internals for leaner contiguity checks and stride handling, cutting redundant materialization on hot paths (@tmattio)
• Merge Lazy_view into the core View API so movement ops operate on a single composed view (@tmattio)
• Documented the reworked View interface (@tmattio)
• Documented the Symbolic_shape interface (@tmattio)
• Added Accelerate framework flag when compiling on macOS, fixing issues in some environments (#129, @nirnayroy)

Hugin

• Let Hugin.show windows close cleanly via the window button or Esc/q, avoiding frozen macOS REPL sessions (@tmattio)

Rune

• Add Rune.no_grad and Rune.detach to mirror JAX stop-gradient semantics (@tmattio)
• Improve gradient performance slightly by replace the reverse-mode tape's linear PhysicalTbl with an identity hash table (@tmattio)
• Fix Rune.Rng.shuffle flattening outputs for multi-dimensional tensors; the
  shuffle now gathers along axis 0 and keeps shapes intact (@tmattio)
• Replace Rune.Rng.truncated_normal clipping with rejection sampling so
  samples stay inside the requested interval without boundary spikes (@tmattio)
• Add support for categorical sampling with Rune.Rng.categorical (#89, @nirnayroy)
• Allow plain llvm-config in discovery, fixing build in some platforms (#71, @stepbrobd)

Kaun

• Added Similarity and Polysemy analysis to the BERT example (#137, @nirnayroy)
• Support attention masks via the new Kaun.Attention module (@tmattio)
• Support loading sharded Hugging Face safetensors (@tmattio)
• Fix BERT and GPT‑2 model loading (@tmattio)
• API simplification: removed type parameters from public types; Ptree now supports mixed‑dtype trees via packed tensors with typed getters. (@tmattio)
• Checkpointing overhaul: versioned Train_state with schema tagging, explicit Checkpoint.{Snapshot,Artifact,Manifest,Repository} (retention, tags, metadata), and simple save/load helpers for snapshots and params. (@tmattio)
• Overhaul dataset combinators: derive tensor specs from Rune dtype, fix sampling/window bugs, validate weighted sampling, and respect drop_remainder (@tmattio)
• Make dataset prefetch truly asynchronous with background domains and allow reusing an external Domainslib pool via parallel_map ~pool (@tmattio)
• Use Dataset.iter for epoch batches to reduce overhead (@tmattio)
• Update BERT and GPT-2 tokenizer cache to use Nx.Cache for consistent cache directory resolution (#134, @Arsalaan-Alam)
• Honor text dataset encodings via incremental Uutf decoding (#122, @Satarupa22-SD).
• Preserve empty sequential modules when unflattening so indices stay aligned for checkpoint round-tripping (@tmattio)
• Prevent Training.fit/evaluate from consuming entire datasets eagerly and fail fast when a dataset yields no batches, avoiding hangs and division-by-zero crashes (@tmattio)
• Allow metric history to tolerate metrics that appear or disappear between epochs so dynamic metric sets no longer raise during training (@tmattio)
• Make Optimizer.clip_by_global_norm robust to zero gradients and empty parameter trees to avoid NaNs during training (@tmattio)
• Split CSV loader into from_csv and from_csv_with_labels to retain labels when requested (#114, @Satarupa22-SD)
• Implement AUC-ROC and AUC-PR in Kaun metrics and simplify their signatures (#124, #131, @Shocker444)
• Add mean absolute percentage error, explained variance, R² (with optional adjustment), KL-divergence, and top-k accuracy to Kaun metrics (@tmattio)
• Add NDCG, MAP, and MRR ranking metrics to Kaun metrics (@tmattio)
• Add BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR metrics to Kaun for pre-tokenized sequences, removing tokenizer dependencies (@tmattio)
• Add SSIM, IoU, and Dice metrics for vision workloads in Kaun (@tmattio)

Talon

• Remove automatic sentinel-based null detection for numeric columns; explicit masks (via [_opt] constructors) now define missing data semantics (@tmattio)
• Replace join nested loops with hashed join indices, cutting lookup from O(n·m) to near O(n) (@tmattio)
• Reuse a shared Nx-based column reindexer so filter/sample paths avoid repeated array copies (@tmattio)
• Fix fillna to honor column null masks and replacements, restoring expected nullable semantics (@tmattio)
• Preserve null masks when reindexing during joins so sentinel values remain valid data (@tmattio)
• Handle numeric index columns in pivot, preventing distinct keys from collapsing into a single bucket (@tmattio)
• Respect null masks when serializing numeric columns to JSON, emitting JSON null instead of sentinel values (@tmattio)
• Detect big integers as int64 in Talon CSV loader (#121, @Arsalaan-Alam)
• Allow forcing column types in Talon JSON loader (#104, @nirnayroy)

Saga

• Remove legacy Normalizers.nmt and Normalizers.precompiled constructors (and their JSON serializers) so the public surface only advertises supported normalizers (@tmattio)
• Tighten template processor JSON parsing: require integer type ids, drop the legacy special-token list format, and ensure multi-id special tokens round-trip with the new record fields (@tmattio)
• Make tokenizer JSON loading tolerant of HuggingFace quirks (missing model.type, string-encoded merges), restoring compatibility with upstream tokenizer.json files (@tmattio)
• Cache byte-level encode/decode lookup tables to avoid rebuilding them during tokenization, trimming avoidable allocations (@tmattio)
• Skip BPE dropout sampling when dropout is disabled, removing redundant RNG work on common hot paths (@tmattio)
• Fix Unigram tokenization so longest matches are emitted without aborting the sequence when a vocab hit occurs (@tmattio)
• Recompute pad token ids when the pad specia...

1.0.0~alpha1

CHANGES:

This release expands the Raven ecosystem with three new libraries (Talon, Saga, Fehu) and significant enhancements to existing ones. alpha1 focuses on breadth—adding foundational capabilities across data processing, NLP, and reinforcement learning—while continuing to iterate on core infrastructure.

New Libraries

Talon - DataFrame Processing

We've added Talon, a new DataFrame library inspired by pandas and polars:

• Columnar data structures that support mixed types (integers, floats, strings, etc.) within a single table (aka heterogeneous datasets)
• Operations: filter rows, group by columns, join tables, compute aggregates
• Load and save data in CSV and JSON formats
• Seamless conversion to/from Nx arrays for numerical operations

Saga - NLP & Text Processing

Saga is a new text processing library for building language models. It provides:

• Tokenizers: Byte-pair encoding (BPE), WordPiece subword tokenization, and character-level splitting
• Text generation: Control output with temperature scaling, top-k filtering, nucleus (top-p) sampling, and custom sampling strategies
• Language models: Train and generate text with statistical n-gram models (bigrams, trigrams, etc.)
• I/O: Read large text files line-by-line and batch-process corpora

Fehu - Reinforcement Learning

Fehu brings reinforcement learning to Raven, with an API inspired by Gymnasium and Stable-Baselines3:

• Standard RL environment interface (reset, step, render) with example environments like Random Walk and CartPole
• Environment wrappers to modify observations, rewards, or episode termination conditions
• Vectorized environments to collect experience from multiple parallel rollouts
• Training utilities: Generalized advantage estimation (GAE), trajectory collection and management
• RL algorithms: Policy gradient method (REINFORCE), deep Q-learning (DQN) with replay buffer
• Use Kaun neural networks as function approximators for policies and value functions

Major Enhancements

Nx - Array Computing

We've significantly expanded Nx's following early user feedback from alpha0:

• Complete linear algebra suite: LAPACK-backed operations matching NumPy including singular value decomposition (SVD), QR factorization, Cholesky decomposition, eigenvalue/eigenvector computation, matrix inverse, and solving linear systems
• FFT operations: Fast Fourier transforms (FFT/IFFT) for frequency domain analysis and signal processing
• Advanced operations: Einstein summation notation (einsum) for complex tensor operations, extract/construct diagonal matrices (diag), cumulative sums and products along axes
• Extended dtypes: Machine learning-focused types including bfloat16 (brain floating point), complex16, and float8 for reduced-precision training
• Symbolic shapes: Internal infrastructure for symbolic shape inference to enable dynamic shapes in future releases (not yet exposed in public API)
• Lazy views: Array views only copy and reorder memory when stride patterns require it, avoiding unnecessary allocations

Rune - Autodiff & JIT

We've continued iterating on Rune's autodiff capabilities, and made progress on upcoming features:

• Forward-mode AD: Compute Jacobian-vector products (jvp) for forward-mode automatic differentiation, complementing existing reverse-mode
• JIT: Ongoing development of LLVM-based just-in-time compilation for Rune computations (currently in prototype stage)
• vmap: Experimental support for vectorized mapping to automatically batch operations (work-in-progress, not yet stable)
• LLVM backend: Added compilation backend with support for LLVM versions 19, 20, and 21
• Metal backend: Continued work on GPU acceleration for macOS using Metal compute shaders

Kaun - Deep Learning

We've expanded Kaun with high-level APIs for deep learning. These APIs are inspired by popular Python frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Flax, and should feel familiar to users building models in Python:

• High-level training: Keras-style fit() function to train models with automatic batching, gradient computation, and parameter updates
• Training state: Encapsulated training state (TrainState) holding parameters, optimizer state, and step count; automatic history tracking of loss and metrics
• Checkpoints: Save and load model weights to disk for model persistence and transfer learning
• Metrics: Automatic metric computation during training including accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, mean absolute error (MAE), and mean squared error (MSE)
• Data pipeline: Composable dataset operations (map, filter, batch, shuffle, cache) inspired by TensorFlow's tf.data for building input pipelines
• Model zoo: Reference implementations of classic and modern architectures (LeNet5 for basic CNNs, BERT for masked language modeling, GPT2 for autoregressive generation) including reusable transformer components
• Ecosystem integration: Load HuggingFace model architectures (kaun.huggingface), access common datasets like MNIST and CIFAR-10 (kaun.datasets), and use standardized model definitions (kaun.models)

Contributors

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release:

• @adamchol (Adam Cholewi) - Implemented the initial associative_scan native backend operation for cumulative operations
• @akshay-gulab (Akshay Gulabrao)
• @DhruvMakwana (Dhruv Makwana) - Implemented einsum for Einstein summation notation
• @gabyfle (Gabriel Santamaria) - Built PocketFFT bindings that replaced our custom FFT kernels
• @lukstafi (Lukasz Stafiniak) - Major contributions to Fehu and FunOCaml workshop on training Sokoban agents
• @nickbetteridge
• @sidkshatriya (Sidharth Kshatriya)

1.0.0~alpha0

CHANGES:

Initial Alpha Release

We're excited to release the zeroth alpha of Raven, an OCaml machine learning ecosystem bringing modern scientific computing to OCaml.

Added

Core Libraries

• Nx - N-dimensional array library with NumPy-like API

  • Multi-dimensional tensors with support for several data types.
  • Zero-copy operations: slicing, reshaping, broadcasting
  • Element-wise and linear algebra operations
  • Swappable backends: Native OCaml, C, Metal
  • I/O support for images (PNG, JPEG) and NumPy files (.npy, .npz)

• Hugin - Publication-quality plotting library

  • 2D plots: line, scatter, bar, histogram, step, error bars, fill-between
  • 3D plots: line3d, scatter3d
  • Image visualization: imshow, matshow
  • Contour plots with customizable levels
  • Text annotations and legends

• Quill - Interactive notebook environment

  • Markdown-based notebooks with live formatting
  • OCaml code execution with persistent session state
  • Integrated data visualization via Hugin
  • Web server mode for browser-based editing

ML/AI Components

• Rune - Automatic differentiation and JIT compilation framework

  • Reverse-mode automatic differentiation
  • Functional API for pure computations
  • Basic JIT infrastructure (in development)

• Kaun - Deep learning framework (experimental)

  • Flax-inspired functional API
  • Basic neural network components
  • Example implementations for XOR and MNIST

• Sowilo - Computer vision library

  • Image manipulation: flip, crop, color conversions
  • Filtering: gaussian_blur, median_blur
  • Morphological operations and edge detection

Supporting Libraries

• Nx-datasets - Common ML datasets (MNIST, Iris, California Housing)
• Nx-text - Text processing and tokenization utilities

Known Issues

This is an alpha release with several limitations:

• Quill editor has UI bugs being addressed
• APIs may change significantly before stable release

Contributors

Initial development by the Raven team. Special thanks to all early testers and contributors.

@axrwl
@gabyfle
@hesterjeng
@ghennequin
@blueavee

And to our early sponsors:

@daemonfire300
@gabyfle
@sabine