Relax transformers version constraint

[giswqs]

Currently, deepforest requires "transformers<4.57.0", making it difficult for downstream packages to adpot it because some packages like SAM3 requires a newer version of transformers.

"safetensors<0.6.0",
"transformers<4.57.0",

I am not sure if the DETR loading issue #1165 still exists. If not, please consider removing the version constraint.

[bw4sz]

@henrykironde and @jveitchmichaelis please discuss and make this a priority, @giswqs is working on a deepforest integration that is important for us to support.

[jveitchmichaelis]

This was patched just before Christmas I believe. I believe it's been fixed in main, but last time I checked it hadn't been released. Ideally we would unpin and only skip 4.57.

It looks like there is no v4.58 and transformers went straight to v5 a few days ago. So we can see if that works. I don't think we should be affected much by the breaking changes there. It's mainly deprecations.

Alternatively there is a fix that we can make for this issue internally. The problem is that the constructor for some models fills the weights with garbage/uninitialised values and this causes training from scratch to blow up randomly, causing the CI to fail. It's straightforward to check and manually initialise the weights in this situation, just a bit hacky.

I'm re-running the CI on #1231. Seems to pass now, so I'm happy to lift the pin and keep an eye on things (it's possible that the bug is flaky enough that it would pass, but it was more often than 1 in 3 times so the CI matrix would usually catch it).

[Prathamesh8989]

Thanks for the investigation and for re-running CI.

From the contributor/downstream side, relaxing the hard pin would unblock several integrations. At the moment, the <4.57 constraint causes resolver failures for packages that depend on newer transformers (e.g. SAM3), as seen in opengeos/geoai#504.

If the DETR issue is resolved in main and CI is passing, I agree that lifting the pin (or skipping only the known-bad version) is a reasonable next step. I’m happy to help test this against downstream integrations once the constraint is relaxed.