Update on TorchVision’s future focus

[NicolasHug]

Dear contributors and users,

I wanted to share an update on what we’ll be prioritizing in TorchVision from now on. In short:

In details:

• The transforms.v2 module, and pre-processing in general, remains our principal area of investments. We’ll keep investing in performance improvements and in new features.
• The utils and ops modules are maintained, but new features will only be added on a best-effort basis.
• The datasets and models modules are still usable and they are not deprecated, but we’ll decrease support. This may mean for example that if a dataset URL breaks, we won’t necessarily actively try to fix the download functionality. The models are already very stable, so regressions are unlikely. New features will likely not be added.
• The capabilities of the io module will eventually move to TorchCodec, where we’re consolidating all of PyTorch encoding/decoding capabilities:
  • For video, changes are effective from now (0.22): the video decoding and encoding capabilities are deprecated and will be removed in 0.24 (end of 2025)!. We strongly encourage you to migrate towards TorchCodec ASAP.
  • The image decoders/encoders remain in torchvision for the time being. They will eventually be migrated to TorchCodec, but there is no ETA on this for now. The migration will involve our usual 2-version deprecation cycle, so you’ll be given a heads-up.

Most of these changes are contributor-facing, not user-facing. As a result, contributors may observe reduced engagement on issues and PRs that relate to the de-prioritized areas (models, datasets, ops and utils).

[twsl]

will batch/list support be a part of the transforms.v2 focus? that is something I am currently missing