Announcing Flower 1.25

As we wrap up the year, the Flower team is excited to announce the release of Flower 1.25 stable, packed with new updates! Flower is a friendly framework for collaborative AI and data science. It makes novel approaches such as federated learning, federated evaluation, federated analytics, and fleet learning accessible to a wide audience of researchers and engineers.

Thanks to our contributors

We would like to give our special thanks to all the contributors who made the new version of Flower possible (in git shortlog order):

Chong Shen Ng, Daniel J. Beutel, Heng Pan, Javier, Mohammad Naseri, Soumik Sarker, William Lindskog, Yan Gao, sarahhfalco

What's new?

• Track compute time and network traffic for runs (#6241, #6242, #6243, #6244, #6245, #6249, #6266, #6267, #6268, #6269, #6270, #6271, #6272, #6273, #6274, #6275, #6276, #6279)

  Flower now records compute time and network traffic for a run. The run detail view shown by flwr list --run-id <run-id> displays traffic exchanged between SuperLink and SuperNode, as well as compute time used by ServerApp and ClientApp.

• Refactor flwr new to pull apps from the Flower platform (#6251, #6252, #6258, #6259, #6260, #6263, #6265, #6283, #6284, #6285, #6292, #6294, #6302)

  Refactors flwr new to fetch Flower apps directly from the Flower platform (see the usage reference). This introduces new and updated quickstart examples (including NumPy and FlowerTune LLM), renames and updates existing examples, aligns CI to run against platform-backed examples, and updates related documentation and benchmark instructions.

• Migrate examples to the Message API and remove outdated Docker Compose as well as Tensorflow Privacy examples (#6232, #6233, #6238, #6297, #6304)

  Migrates the scikit-learn, Vertical FL, and Opacus examples to the Message API, with the Vertical FL example also updated to use flwr-datasets. The outdated Docker Compose and Tensorflow Privacy examples are removed.

• Improve CLI output with human-readable durations (#6277, #6296)

  Updates the Flower CLI to display durations in a more human-friendly format (xd xh xm xs), automatically selecting appropriate units instead of the previous HH:MM:SS format.

• Update examples and baselines (#6234, #6256, #6257, #6264, #6280, #6281, #6286, #6287, #6288, #6290, #6291, #6293)

• Improve documentation (#6229, #6230, #6255, #6262)

• Update CI/CD configuration (#6168, #6246, #6295, #6305)

• General improvements (#6056, #6085, #6176, #6235, #6236, #6254, #6278, #6299)

  As always, many parts of the Flower framework and quality infrastructure were improved and updated.

Incompatible changes

• Remove bundled templates from flwr new (#6261)

  Removes the templates previously bundled with the Flower wheel now that flwr new pulls apps from the Flower platform. The --framework and --username options are deprecated as part of this change.