Python package

• Support Python 3.13 #2748. Thanks to @jeremy010203.
• Support NumPy 2.x. #2671
• Drop support for obsolete Python 3.7.
• Use the proper name of the implementation class as a string id when storing values calculated for custom metrics on GPU. #1792
• Propagate exceptions from custom metrics code on GPU. #1792

CatBoost for Apache Spark

• Fix workers hanging after training. #2151. Thanks to @Shamann.
• Remove support for Spark 2.x

Improvements

• [R-package] Allow targets of character and factor types (useful for classes). #1874
• Better default leaf_estimation_iterations for Tweedie regression on GPU. #2812

Build & testing

• Switch to external Cython 3.0.10+ instead of 0.29.x-based version from contrib. #2810
• Switch to Conan 2.x. #2582
• [CUDA]. Do not output detailed ptxas statistics by default.
• Used OpenSSL version updated to 3.0.15

Bugfixes

• [JVM applier]. Methods related to evaluator types have been private by mistake.
• [JVM applier]. Categorical features hashing methods have been private by mistake.
• Fix crash when training on a quantized dataset that contains categorical features. #2816
• Fix prediction of type Probability on CPUs that do not have SSE4 instruction set (that includes all ARM CPUs). Values with probability 0 have been erroneously computed as nan.
• Fix race condition when loading sparse datasets.