26.05 Release Notes

docs/docs/extraction/releasenotes.md

@@ -2,36 +2,36 @@
 
 This documentation contains the release notes for [NeMo Retriever Library](overview.md).
 
-## 26.03 Release Notes (26.3.0)
+## 26.05 Release Notes (26.5.0)
 
-NVIDIA® NeMo Retriever Library version 26.03 adds broader hardware and software support along with many pipeline, evaluation, and deployment enhancements.
+NVIDIA® NeMo Retriever Library version 26.05 builds on the 26.03 foundation with a graph-based ingest architecture, expanded multimodal and tabular capabilities, production-oriented service deployment, and documentation aligned to a Helm-first supported path.
 
 To upgrade the Helm charts for this release, refer to the [NeMo Retriever Library Helm Charts](https://github.com/NVIDIA/NeMo-Retriever/blob/main/nemo_retriever/helm/README.md).
 
-Highlights for the 26.03 release include:
-
-- Legacy ingestion repository consolidated under NeMo-Retriever  
-- NeMo Retriever Extraction pipeline renamed to NeMo Retriever Library  
-- NeMo Retriever Library now supports two deployment options:  
-  - A new no-container, pip-installable in-process library for development (available on PyPI)  
-  - Existing production-ready Helm chart with NIMs  
-- Added documentation notes on Air-gapped deployment support  
-- Added documentation notes on OpenShift support  
-- Added support for RTX4500 Pro Blackwell SKU  
-- Added support for llama-nemotron-embed-vl-v2 in text and text+image modes  
-- New extract methods `pdfium_hybrid` and `ocr` target scanned PDFs to improve text and layout extraction from image-based pages  
-- VLM-based image caption enhancements:  
-  - Infographics can be captioned  
-  - Reasoning mode is configurable  
-- Enabled hybrid search with Lancedb  
-- Added retrieval_bench subfolder with generalizable agentic retrieval pipeline  
-- The project now uses UV as the primary environment and package manager instead of Conda, resulting in faster installs and simpler dependency handling  
-- Default TTL for long-running pipeline job state increased from 1–2 hours to 48 hours so long-running jobs (for example, VLM captioning) do not expire before completion  
-- NeMo Retriever Library currently does not support image captioning via VLM; this feature will be added in the next release
-- Documentation: multimodal extraction is covered on one page with an in-page table of contents and redirects from the former per-topic URLs
+Highlights for the 26.05 release include:
+
+- **Graph-based ingest pipeline** — `graph_pipeline` and the graph stage registry are the canonical ingestion path; mode-specific example scripts are consolidated around this model  
+- **Root CLI** — `retriever ingest` and `retriever query` with NIM URL flags, batch tuning, and LanceDB controls (overwrite/append)  
+- **Retriever Service v2** — scalable multi-pod architecture with gateway, process isolation, and VectorDB integration  
+- **Nemotron OCR v2** — default OCR engine with CLI language selectors and unified OCR actors  
+- **VLM image captioning** — image captioning via vLLM (including Omni caption model profiles); addresses the capability deferred in 26.03  
+- **vLLM inference stack** — vLLM-backed text and vision-language embedders, multimodal VL reranker, and torch 2.11 stack for local GPU installs  
+- **Video retrieval pipeline** — frame extraction, OCR, audio-visual fusion, and text deduplication for video corpora  
+- **Text-to-SQL** — agent graph and tabular tooling for structured data retrieval  
+- **Live RAG SDK** — `Retriever.answer()` and optional batch operator graph via LiteLLM (`[llm]` extra)  
+- **Vector database** — VDB operators integrated directly in the pipeline; custom metadata support; LanceDB hybrid search guidance updated  
+- **Evaluation** — BEIR-centric evaluation overhaul; `retriever skill-eval` benchmark CLI for the NeMo Retriever skill  
+- **Packaging** — optional install extras (`[local]`, `[multimedia]`, `[llm]`, `[tabular]`, `[nemotron-parse]`, `[service]`, and others) including slim remote/NIM-only installs on Mac and Windows  
+- **Audio** — long-audio Parakeet chunking with time-aligned segments; punctuation-based audio segmenting  
+- **`allow_no_gpu`** — option to skip GPU requirement during ingest for CPU-only experimentation  
+- **Chunking API** — text splitting moved into `.extract(split_config=...)`  
+- **Documentation** — Helm-first deployment story; [Docker Compose for local development](https://github.com/NVIDIA/NeMo-Retriever/blob/main/nemo_retriever/docker.md) documented as **unsupported** developer tooling (not a production NIM deployment path)  
+- **Documentation** — duplicate user-defined stages page removed; UDF and custom stages guidance consolidated in the [graph README](https://github.com/NVIDIA/NeMo-Retriever/tree/main/nemo_retriever/src/nemo_retriever/graph#nemo-retriever-graph)  
+- **Documentation** — consolidated extraction concepts, ingest workflow, embeddings, and audio/video guides  
 
 ## Release Notes for Previous Versions
 
+| [26.03](https://docs.nvidia.com/nemo/retriever/26.3.0/extraction/releasenotes/)
 | [26.1.2](https://docs.nvidia.com/nemo/retriever/26.1.2/extraction/releasenotes/)
 | [26.1.1](https://docs.nvidia.com/nemo/retriever/26.1.1/extraction/releasenotes/)
 | [25.9.0](https://docs.nvidia.com/nemo/retriever/25.9.0/extraction/releasenotes/)