[FR] Ability to query latest model from registry

[aniryou]

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Please fill in this feature request template to ensure a timely and thorough response.

Willingness to contribute

The MLflow Community encourages new feature contributions. Would you or another member of your organization be willing to contribute an implementation of this feature (either as an MLflow Plugin or an enhancement to the MLflow code base)?

• Yes. I can contribute this feature independently.
• Yes. I would be willing to contribute this feature with guidance from the MLflow community.
• No. I cannot contribute this feature at this time.

Proposal Summary

The model registry allows convenient interface to load a model (e.g. models:/regressor/Production, models:/regressor/42). It'll be great to be able to extend this functionality to access the latest version model (e.g. models:/regressor/latest) and if possible other recent versions (e.g., models:/regressor/latest-1, ..., models:/regressor/latest-n).

This allows easy referencing for programmatic access and sophisticated model validation (e.g., detect model drift against last N models).

Motivation

• What is the use case for this feature?
• Why is this use case valuable to support for MLflow users in general?
• Why is this use case valuable to support for your project(s) or organization?
• Why is it currently difficult to achieve this use case? (please be as specific as possible about why related MLflow features and components are insufficient)

What component(s), interfaces, languages, and integrations does this feature affect?

Components

• area/artifacts: Artifact stores and artifact logging
• area/build: Build and test infrastructure for MLflow
• area/docs: MLflow documentation pages
• area/examples: Example code
• area/model-registry: Model Registry service, APIs, and the fluent client calls for Model Registry
• area/models: MLmodel format, model serialization/deserialization, flavors
• area/projects: MLproject format, project running backends
• area/scoring: Local serving, model deployment tools, spark UDFs
• area/server-infra: MLflow server, JavaScript dev server
• area/tracking: Tracking Service, tracking client APIs, autologging

Interfaces

• area/uiux: Front-end, user experience, JavaScript, plotting
• area/docker: Docker use across MLflow's components, such as MLflow Projects and MLflow Models
• area/sqlalchemy: Use of SQLAlchemy in the Tracking Service or Model Registry
• area/windows: Windows support

Languages

• language/r: R APIs and clients
• language/java: Java APIs and clients
• language/new: Proposals for new client languages

Integrations

• integrations/azure: Azure and Azure ML integrations
• integrations/sagemaker: SageMaker integrations
• integrations/databricks: Databricks integrations

Details

(Use this section to include any additional information about the feature. If you have a proposal for how to implement this feature, please include it here. For implementation guidelines, please refer to the Contributing Guide.)

[dmatrix]

@aniryou Thanks for filing this. You do have client APIs that allow you to get the latest versions of a model

[lichenran1234]

Support of specifying 'latest' in model URI was added in #5027