Axon.serialize seems to be gone?

[aphillipo]

Hi there,

I understand at version 0.7 maybe the API isn't stable yet, but deleting a way to save the model from the codebase without adding this to the changelog, marking these functions as deprecated, suggesting to people in the docs saving with ONNX is the best solution (is this the right way?), seems confusing.

I'm happy to help add an example of the best way to save a model for inference but I'm totally stumped.

Even the ONNX guide seems to use Axon.serialize?

axon/guides/serialization/onnx_to_axon.livemd

Line 96 in 35004b4

model_bytes = Axon.serialize(model, parameters)

Maybe there is something broken about what I am doing with Axon?

Let me know how I can help clarify this in the docs at least! Thank you!

[zorn]

Similarly, noticing deserialize/2 was removed in the 0.7 update but not mentioned in the changelog.

https://hexdocs.pm/axon/0.6.1/Axon.html#deserialize/2

[seanmor5]

Thanks for bringing this up. I'll add some serialization/deserialization documentation. These were removed in favor of using Nx.serialize and Nx.deserialize - with the idea that you should serialize only the parameters (because they are data) and then leave the model in code. Serialization has some drawbacks with more complex models, because it's easy to end up trying to serialize anonymous functions that cannot be properly deserialized later.