v0.12.4: Patch release

What's Changed

• Update version.txt after 0.12.3 release by @mrwyattii in #4673
• [MII] catch error wrt HF version and Mistral by @jeffra in #4634
• [NPU] Add NPU support for unit test by @RUAN-ZX in #4569
• [op-builder] use unique exceptions for cuda issues by @jeffra in #4653
• Add stable diffusion unit test by @mrwyattii in #2496
• [CANN] Support cpu offload optimizer for Ascend NPU by @hipudding in #4568
• Inference Checkpoints in V2 by @cmikeh2 in #4664
• KV Cache Improved Flexibility by @cmikeh2 in #4668
• Fix for when prompt contains an odd num of apostrophes by @oelayan7 in #4660
• universal-ckp: support megatron-deepspeed llama model by @mosheisland in #4666
• Add new MII unit tests by @mrwyattii in #4693
• [Bug fix] WarmupCosineLR issues by @sbwww in #4688
• infV2 fix for OPT size variants by @mrwyattii in #4694
• Add get and set APIs for the ZeRO-3 partitioned parameters by @yiliu30 in #4681
• Remove unneeded dict reinit (fix for #4565) by @eisene in #4702
• Update flops profiler to recurse by @loadams in #4374
• Communication Optimization for Large-Scale Training by @RezaYazdaniAminabadi in #4695
• [docs] Intel inference blog by @jeffra in #4734
• use all_gather_into_tensor instead of all_gather by @taozhiwei in #4705
• Install deepspeed-kernels only on Linux by @aphedges in #4739
• Add nv-sd badge to README by @loadams in #4747
• Re-organize .gitignore file to be parsed properly by @aphedges in #4740
• fix mics run with offload++ by @GuanhuaWang in #4749
• Fix logger formatting for partitioning flags by @OAfzal in #4728
• fix: to solve #4726 by @RUAN-ZX in #4727
• Add safetensors support by @jihnenglin in #4659

New Contributors

• @RUAN-ZX made their first contribution in #4569
• @oelayan7 made their first contribution in #4660
• @sbwww made their first contribution in #4688
• @yiliu30 made their first contribution in #4681
• @eisene made their first contribution in #4702
• @taozhiwei made their first contribution in #4705
• @OAfzal made their first contribution in #4728
• @jihnenglin made their first contribution in #4659

Full Changelog: v0.12.3...v0.12.4