Does model output changes when upgrading API version?

Question

Hi,
We recently received a mail about FR API version upgrade:
"You're receiving this notice because you currently use or have used the Azure Form Recognizer v2.0 (preview) or v2.1 (preview) API. "

I have a few questions regarding the upgrade:
1.Does model quality (or analysis outcome) change based on API version used?
2.Do we need to update Azure ARM template to latest "2021-10-01"to use required API version? our current FR instance is deployed using version "2017-04-18". Or in other words, do we need to upgrade Azure FR resource as well to comply with new API version requirement?

we are in progress of upgrading the nuget package "Azure.AI.FormRecognizer" to v3.1.1 and while testing new version we noticed that baseline results (same input data) do not match the results we got when we first created the model (~1 year ago)
3.We are wondering there is this difference coming from. is it not given that a model will always return same outcome for same input data?

Answer 1

Hello @Audrius B

Thanks for reaching out to us, for your question, please see below comment.

1.Does model quality (or analysis outcome) change based on API version used?
It depends the updates between versions, sometimes the new release only related to new feature added. But from API V2.1 to API V3.0, there are breaking changes. Please see this release note to check what exactly changed:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/applied-ai-services/form-recognizer/whats-new?tabs=csharp#february-2022

2.Do we need to update Azure ARM template to latest "2021-10-01"to use required API version? our current FR instance is deployed using version "2017-04-18". Or in other words, do we need to upgrade Azure FR resource as well to comply with new API version requirement?

You do not need to update your FR resource since it will work for all versions currently. I have attached a table shows the SDK package and it supports API version for your reference.

https://azuresdkdocs.blob.core.windows.net/$web/dotnet/Azure.AI.FormRecognizer/4.0.0-beta.3/index.html#examples

3.We are wondering there is this difference coming from. is it not given that a model will always return same outcome for same input data?

It depends the function you are using and version you are in, from API V2.0 to API V3, there are big changes. I can give you an example, we have added hotel receipt model to our latest API, which means the result for reading hotel receipt will be better compared to older model.

Hope above helps!

Regards,
Yutong

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