I just released Vowpal Wabbit 8.3 and we are planning a tutorial at NIPS Saturday over the lunch break in the ML systems workshop. Please join us if interested.
8.3 should be backwards compatible with all 8.x series. There have been big changes since the last version related to
- Contextual bandits, particularly w.r.t. the decision service.
- Learning to search for which we have a paper at NIPS.
- Logarithmic time multiclass classification.