What's new in TensorFlow 2.20

TensorFlow 2.20 has been released! For ongoing updates related to the multi-backend Keras, please note that all news and releases, starting with Keras 3.0, are now published directly on keras.io. You can find a complete list of all changes in the full release notes on GitHub.

tf.lite is being replaced by LiteRT

The tf.lite module will be deprecated with development for on-device inference moving to a new, independent repository: LiteRT. The new APIs are available in Kotlin and C++. This code base will decouple from the TensorFlow repository and tf.lite will be removed from future TensorFlow Python packages, so we encourage migration of projects to LiteRT to receive the latest updates. More details to follow.

As announced at Google I/O ‘25, LiteRT improves upon TFLite, particularly for NPU and GPU hardware acceleration and performance for on-device ML and AI applications.

LiteRT provides a unified interface for Neural Processing Units (NPUs), removing the need to navigate vendor-specific compilers or libraries. This approach avoids many device-specific complications, boosts performance for real-time and large-model inference, and minimizes memory copies through zero-copy hardware buffer usage.

For more information on the new repository and to sign up for the NPU Early Access Program, please reach out to the team at g.co/ai/LiteRT-NPU-EAP.

Faster input pipeline warm-up with tf.data

To help reduce latency, especially the time it takes for your model to process the first element of a dataset, we've added autotune.min_parallelism in tf.data.Options. This new option allows asynchronous dataset operations like .map and .batch to immediately start with a specified minimum level of parallelism, speeding up the initial warm-up time for your input pipelines.

Changes to I/O GCS filesystem package

The tensorflow-io-gcs-filesystem package for Google Cloud Storage support is now optional. Previously, it was installed, by default, with TensorFlow. If your workflow requires access to GCS, you must now explicitly install this package by running: pip install "tensorflow[gcs-filesystem]".

Note that the package has recently received limited support, and there is currently no guarantee it will be available for newer Python versions.