โ ๏ธ Breaking Change
Impact Score: 7/10
Hugging Face Transformers: Longformer
Source available โ automated, not human-reviewed
Component: transformers ยท Channel: stable. Automated analysis, not a compatibility certification. How this works.
Analysis updated: 2026-11-01.
Breaking-change evidence from the source
โ ๏ธ This PR is breaking for the following models: BART, Flaubert, bert-japanese, bert-base-finnish, bert-base-dutch. โ ๏ธ
Update: โ ๏ธ This PR is also breaking for ALBERT from Tensorflow. See issue #4806 for discussion and resolution โ ๏ธ
โก Executive Summary (TL;DR)
Hugging Face Transformers v2.11.0. Source highlight: Longformer (@ibeltagy)
Who Does This Impact? (Role-Based Analysis)
๐ป Software Engineers & Devs
Check the source notes against the package and APIs you use before upgrading.
๐ Product & Engineering Leads
Use the documented changes to assess relevance to your product; release frequency alone is not a quality measure.
โ๏ธ DevOps & Security
Verify the target version, runtime requirements and rollback procedure in the official documentation.
โ ๏ธ Breaking Changes & Deprecations (2)
- โ ๏ธ This PR is breaking for the following models: BART, Flaubert, bert-japanese, bert-base-finnish, bert-base-dutch. โ ๏ธ
- Update: โ ๏ธ This PR is also breaking for ALBERT from Tensorflow. See issue #4806 for discussion and resolution โ ๏ธ
โก Performance & Enhancements (1)
- A step-by-step guide to tracking hugging face model performance with wandb (@jxmorris12, @lavanyashukla)
๐ง Bug Fixes & Patches (6)
- Fix longformer attention mask type casting when using APEX (@peskotivesgeroff)
- Fix convert_token_type_ids_from_sequences for fast tokenizers (@n1t0, #4503)
- Fixed the default tokenizer of the summarization pipeline (@sshleifer, #4506)
- The `max_len` attribute is now more robust, and warns the user about deprecation (@mfuntowicz, #4528)
- Added type hints to `modeling_utils.py` (@bglearning, #3911)
- MMBT model now has `nn.Module` as a superclass (@shoarora, #4533)
๐ View Raw Release Notes (Original Developer Log)
## Longformer
- Longformer (@ibeltagy)
- Longformer for QA (@patil-suraj + @patrickvonplaten)
- Longformer fast tokenizer (@patil-suraj)
- Longformer for sequence classification (@patil-suraj)
- Longformer for token classification (@patil-suraj)
- Longformer for Multiple Choice (@patrickvonplaten)
- More user-friendly handling of global attention mask vs local attention mask (@patrickvonplaten)
- Fix longformer attention mask type casting when using APEX (@peskotivesgeroff)
## New community notebooks!
- Long Sequence Modeling with Reformer (@patrickvonplaten)
- Fine-tune BART for summarization (@ohmeow)
- Fine-tune a pre-trained Transformer on anyone's tweets (@borisdayma, @lavanyashukla)
- A step-by-step guide to tracking hugging face model performance with wandb (@jxmorris12, @lavanyashukla)
- Fine-tune Longformer for QA (@patil-suraj)
- Pretrain Longformer (@ibeltagy)
- Fine-tune T5 for sentiment span extraction (@enzoampil)
## URLs to model weights are not hardcoded anymore (@julien-c)
Archive maps were dictionaries linking pre-trained models to their S3 URLs. Since the arrival of the model hub, these have become obsolete.
โ ๏ธ This PR is breaking for the following models: BART, Flaubert, bert-japanese, bert-base-finnish, bert-base-dutch. โ ๏ธ
Those models now have to be instantiated with their full model id:
> "cl-tohoku/bert-base-japanese"
> "cl-tohoku/bert-base-japanese-whole-word-masking"
> "cl-tohoku/bert-base-japanese-char"
> "cl-tohoku/bert-base-japanese-char-whole-word-masking"
> "TurkuNLP/bert-base-finnish-cased-v1"
> "TurkuNLP/bert-base-finnish-uncased-v1"
> "wietsedv/bert-base-dutch-cased"
> "flaubert/flaubert_small_cased"
> "flaubert/flaubert_base_uncased"
> "flaubert/flaubert_base_cased"
> "flaubert/flaubert_large_cased"
>
> all variants of "facebook/bart"
Update: โ ๏ธ This PR is also breaking for ALBERT from Tensorflow. See issue #4806 for discussion and resolution โ ๏ธ
## Fixes and improvements
- Fix convert_token_type_ids_from_sequences for fast tokenizers (@n1t0, #4503)
- Fixed the default tokenizer of the summarization pipeline (@sshleifer, #4506)
- The `max_len` attribute is now more robust, and warns the user about deprecation (@mfuntowicz, #4528)
- Added type hints to `modeling_utils.py` (@bglearning, #3911)
- MMBT model now has `nn.Module` as a superclass (@shoarora, #4533)
- Fixing tokenization of extra_id symbols in the T5 tokenizer (@mansimov, #4353)
- Slow GPU tests run daily (@julien-c, #4465)
- Removed PyTorch artifacts in TensorFlow XLNet implementation (@ZhuBaohe, #4410)
- Fixed the T5 Cross Attention Position Bias (@ZhuBaohe, #4499)
- The `transformers-cli` is now cross-platform (@BramVanroy, #4131) + (@patrickvonplaten, #4614)
- GPT-2, CTRL: Accept `input_ids` and `past` of variable length (@patrickvonplaten, #4581)
- Added back `--do_lower_case` to SQuAD examples.
- Correct framework test requirement for language generation tests (@sshleifer, #4616)
- Fix `add_special_tokens` on fast tokenizers (@n1t0, #4531)
- MNLI & SST-2 bugs were fixed (@stdcoutzyx, #4546)
- Fixed BERT example for NSP and multiple choice (@siboehm, #3953)
- Encoder/decoder fix initialization and save/load bug (@patrickvonplaten, #4680)
- Fix onnx export input names order (@RensDimmendaal, #4641)
- Configuration: ensure that id2label always takes precedence over `num_labels` (@julien-c, direct commit to `master`)
- Make docstring match argument (@sgugger, #4711)
- Specify PyTorch versions for examples (@LysandreJik, #4710)
- Override get_vocab for fast tokenizers (@mfuntowicz, #4717)
- Tokenizer should not add special tokens for text generation (@patrickvonplaten, #4686)