The Flower team is excited to announce the release of Flower 1.38 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):
Charles Beauville, Chong Shen Ng, Daniel J. Beutel, Daniel Nata Nugraha, Dimitris Stripelis, Heng Pan, Javier, Lorenzo Sani, Mohammad Naseri, Ruth Galindo, Taner Topal, Yan Gao
What's new?
-
Run AgentApps across a federation (experimental) (#8143, #8150, #8166, #8170, #8175, #8181, #8183, #8185, #8192, #8193, #8197, #8200, #8204, #8205, #8209, #8211, #8214, #8216, #8219)
AgentApps can now run on both SuperLink and SuperNodes within a federation, enabling agents at the federation level and on individual nodes to communicate with one another. An AgentApp on SuperLink can discover available SuperNodes, send JSON messages to agents on selected nodes, and collect their replies; agents on SuperNodes can receive those messages and respond to the sender. The grid tools for agents expose this workflow through get_nodes, push_messages, and pull_messages. SuperNode-hosted AgentApps also support the Open Responses-compatible endpoint, user prompts, and run-series events.
-
Use Endeavor with ChatGPT/Codex and OpenCode (#8117, #8199, #8202, #8222)
New guides explain how to connect ChatGPT/Codex and OpenCode to Endeavor. The documentation also distinguishes the supplied Codex configuration's 128,000-token context window and 96,000-token compaction threshold from the model's one-million-token maximum context length, while noting that effective request limits depend on the deployment and provider route.
-
Use native connector actions and access local files (#8164, #8177, #8178, #8182, #8191, #8203)
GitHub, Slack, and Notion connector actions now follow their native API names, options, responses, and diagnostics, while Attio's identify action matches its documented scopes. A new read-only FileSystem connector enables AgentApps to list and read contents in the configured directory. The FileSystem tools only become avaialble when FLWR_FILESYSTEM_ALLOWED_DIRS is set.
-
Set SuperNodes name and location (#8213, #8215, #8217, #8218)
Register a SuperNode with an optional human-readable --name and --location <latitude>,<longitude>.
-
Drop --plugin-type from SuperExec (#8151, #8152, #8153, #8157)
flower-superexec now selects the process to launch from the task type, so --plugin-type is deprecated, and has no effect. The obsolete ServerappEphemeral plugin has also been removed.
-
Prepare flwr-model for faster AgentApp responses (#8187, #8188, #8189)
-
General improvements (#8130, #8145, #8146, #8156, #8160, #8161, #8163, #8165, #8169, #8171, #8172, #8174, #8179, #8195, #8196, #8198, #8220, #8223, #8224)
As always, many parts of the Flower framework and quality infrastructure were improved and updated.