RecLayer, default name scope consistent, no "rec"

[albertz]

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Currently it would always add this rec part. There was some technical reason long ago for this but this is not really needed anymore and is just inconsistent.

Removing it now would however make all checkpoints incompatible. On RETURNN side, I think this can pretty easily be fixed via the CustomCheckpointLoader. So I'm not sure that we need a new behavior_version for this.

[albertz]

@JackTemaki @patrick-wilken some thoughts? Agree?

[patrick-wilken]

Yes, sounds good. We, the MT team, rarely use the checkpoints outside of RETURNN, so making it backwards compatible on RETURNN side would be enough for us. But what about importing models into RASR? Are the exact variable names important there?

[albertz]

But what about importing models into RASR? Are the exact variable names important there?

If you have a checkpoint from old version, and use the compile_tf_graph script from the same old version, all is fine.

If you have a checkpoint from old version and want to use a new RETURNN for further training, all is fine, it will automatically convert it.

If you have a checkpoint from old version and want to use compile_tf_graph from a new RETURNN version, you need to first convert the checkpoint. You could simply load the checkpoint once, then it will automatically convert it, and save it again. We could make a simple script which completely automates this.