> The main new feature of Thinc v9 is the support for [learning rate schedules](https://thinc.ai/docs/api-schedules#schedule) that can take the training dynamics into account. For example, the new [`plateau.v1`](https://thinc.ai/docs/api-schedules#plateau) schedule scales the learning rate when no progress has been found after a given number of evaluation steps. Another visible change is that [`AppleOps`](https://thinc.ai/docs/api-backends) is now part of Thinc, so it is not necessary anymore to install [`thinc-apple-ops`](https://github.com/explosion/thinc-apple-ops) to use the AMX units on Apple Silicon.
✨ New features and improvements
- [Learning rate schedules](https://thinc.ai/docs/api-schedules#schedule) can now take the training step as well as an arbitrary set of keyword arguments. This makes it possible to pass information such a the parameter name and last evaluation score to determine the learning rate (804).
- Added the [`plateau.v1`](https://thinc.ai/docs/api-schedules#plateau) schedule (842). This schedule scales the learning rate if training was found to be stagnant for a given period.
- The functionality of [`thinc-apple-ops`](https://github.com/explosion/thinc-apple-ops) is integrated into Thinc (#927). Starting with this version of Thinc, it is not necessary anymore to install `thinc-apple-ops`.
🔴 Bug fixes
- Fix the use of thread-local storage ([917](https://github.com/explosion/thinc/commit/5c46b82a47781ebff91c953c42c2361a3cdd4f15)).
⚠️ Backwards incompatibilities
- Thinc v9.0.0 only support Python 3.9 and later.
- Schedules are not generators anymore, but implementations of the [`Schedule`](https://thinc.ai/docs/api-schedules#schedule) class (804).
- `thinc.backends.linalg` has been removed (742). The same functionality is provided by implementations in BLAS that are better tested and more performant.
- `thinc.extra.search` has been removed (743). The beam search functionality in this module was strongly coupled to the spaCy transition parser and has therefore [moved to spaCy](https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/pull/11317) in v4.
👥 Contributors
adrianeboyd, danieldk, honnibal, ines, kadarakos, shadeMe, svlandeg