v0.8.0 - improved quality and crop-training support

[bghira]

Changelog

Breaking Changes

• SDXL Launch Script Format: Updated launch script format, set new defaults, and rearranged options, introducing breaking changes.
  • PR: #226 by @bghira

New Features

• BucketManager: Enhanced to remove images that are too small, now controlled via --minimum_image_size.
  • PR: #223 by @bghira
• Captioning Toolkit: Advanced CogVLM captioner and a basic LLaVA captioner now available.
  • PR: #222 by @bghira
• Crop Options: Added --crop_style and --crop_aspect options for improved control over cropping behavior.
  • PR: #222 by @bghira
• Validation Negative Prompt: Added --validation_negative_prompt option.
  • PR: #222 by @bghira

Enhancements and Refinements

• Learning Rate Scheduler: Distinguished between cosine and cosine_with_restarts schedulers. The default LR scheduler is now cosine.
  • PR: #222 by @bghira
• DeepSpeed for SD 2.x: Integrated DeepSpeed for improved performance in Stable Diffusion 2.x models.
  • PR: #222 by @bghira
• Downsampling Method: Switched to using LANCZOS for downsampling to reduce image artifacts compared to BICUBIC.
  • PR: #222 by @bghira
• Diffusers Update: Adapted to the new version of the diffusers library and fixed issues related to the refactored config style.
  • PR: #228 by @bghira

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Captioning Dropout: Enhanced to also drop conditioning inputs, ensuring a more consistent dropout mechanism.
  • PR: #229 by @bghira
• Unit Tests: Added unit tests for random cropping within image boundaries and updated VAE Cache to accommodate random crop coordinates.
  • PR: #229 by @bghira
• EMA Model Params: Optimized logging to not print EMA (Exponential Moving Average) model parameters.
  • PR: #227 by @bghira
• Dropout Code Conflict: Removed unnecessary conflicting dropout code.
  • PR: #230 by @bghira

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Full Changelog: v0.7.4...v0.8.0

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This discussion was created from the release v0.8.0 - improved quality and crop-training support.