CLJul 31, 2024
Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical SizeGemma Team, Morgane Riviere, Shreya Pathak et al. · deepmind
In this work, we introduce Gemma 2, a new addition to the Gemma family of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models, ranging in scale from 2 billion to 27 billion parameters. In this new version, we apply several known technical modifications to the Transformer architecture, such as interleaving local-global attentions (Beltagy et al., 2020a) and group-query attention (Ainslie et al., 2023). We also train the 2B and 9B models with knowledge distillation (Hinton et al., 2015) instead of next token prediction. The resulting models deliver the best performance for their size, and even offer competitive alternatives to models that are 2-3 times bigger. We release all our models to the community.
CYAug 29, 2024
LLMs generate structurally realistic social networks but overestimate political homophilySerina Chang, Alicja Chaszczewicz, Emma Wang et al.
Generating social networks is essential for many applications, such as epidemic modeling and social simulations. The emergence of generative AI, especially large language models (LLMs), offers new possibilities for social network generation: LLMs can generate networks without additional training or need to define network parameters, and users can flexibly define individuals in the network using natural language. However, this potential raises two critical questions: 1) are the social networks generated by LLMs realistic, and 2) what are risks of bias, given the importance of demographics in forming social ties? To answer these questions, we develop three prompting methods for network generation and compare the generated networks to a suite of real social networks. We find that more realistic networks are generated with "local" methods, where the LLM constructs relations for one persona at a time, compared to "global" methods that construct the entire network at once. We also find that the generated networks match real networks on many characteristics, including density, clustering, connectivity, and degree distribution. However, we find that LLMs emphasize political homophily over all other types of homophily and significantly overestimate political homophily compared to real social networks.
83.8CVMay 26
Gemini Embedding 2: A Native Multimodal Embedding Model from GeminiMadhuri Shanbhogue, Zhe Li, Shanfeng Zhang et al.
We introduce Gemini Embedding 2, a native multimodal embedding model that allows embedding video, audio, image, and text modalities in a unified representation space. We leverage the multimodal capabilities of Gemini to produce embeddings for arbitrary combinations of interleaved inputs across all these modalities that generalize well across a wide variety of tasks. Applying large-scale contrastive learning in a multi-task multi-stage training setup, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on key embedding benchmarks including unimodal, cross-modal, and multimodal retrieval spanning a diverse set of tasks. We show that our embedding model demonstrates strong performance (with a score of 62.9 R@1 on MSCOCO, 68.8 NDCG@10 on Vatex, 69.9 on MTEB multilingual and 84.0 on MTEB Code) across a variety of tasks surpassing the performance of specialized models. These unified capabilities make Gemini Embedding 2 a promising candidate for downstream use cases such as RAG, recommendation and search. Furthermore, its robust zero-shot performance across distinct fields - from astronomy and bioscience to fine arts and the culinary arts - establishes it as a highly reliable, out-of-the-box representation even for specialized domains.
CLMar 8, 2024
Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of contextGemini Team, Petko Georgiev, Ving Ian Lei et al. · deepmind, mila
In this report, we introduce the Gemini 1.5 family of models, representing the next generation of highly compute-efficient multimodal models capable of recalling and reasoning over fine-grained information from millions of tokens of context, including multiple long documents and hours of video and audio. The family includes two new models: (1) an updated Gemini 1.5 Pro, which exceeds the February version on the great majority of capabilities and benchmarks; (2) Gemini 1.5 Flash, a more lightweight variant designed for efficiency with minimal regression in quality. Gemini 1.5 models achieve near-perfect recall on long-context retrieval tasks across modalities, improve the state-of-the-art in long-document QA, long-video QA and long-context ASR, and match or surpass Gemini 1.0 Ultra's state-of-the-art performance across a broad set of benchmarks. Studying the limits of Gemini 1.5's long-context ability, we find continued improvement in next-token prediction and near-perfect retrieval (>99%) up to at least 10M tokens, a generational leap over existing models such as Claude 3.0 (200k) and GPT-4 Turbo (128k). Finally, we highlight real-world use cases, such as Gemini 1.5 collaborating with professionals on completing their tasks achieving 26 to 75% time savings across 10 different job categories, as well as surprising new capabilities of large language models at the frontier; when given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned from the same content.
CLJul 7, 2025
Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic CapabilitiesGheorghe Comanici, Eric Bieber, Mike Schaekermann et al. · amazon-science, baidu
In this report, we introduce the Gemini 2.X model family: Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash, as well as our earlier Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite models. Gemini 2.5 Pro is our most capable model yet, achieving SoTA performance on frontier coding and reasoning benchmarks. In addition to its incredible coding and reasoning skills, Gemini 2.5 Pro is a thinking model that excels at multimodal understanding and it is now able to process up to 3 hours of video content. Its unique combination of long context, multimodal and reasoning capabilities can be combined to unlock new agentic workflows. Gemini 2.5 Flash provides excellent reasoning abilities at a fraction of the compute and latency requirements and Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite provide high performance at low latency and cost. Taken together, the Gemini 2.X model generation spans the full Pareto frontier of model capability vs cost, allowing users to explore the boundaries of what is possible with complex agentic problem solving.
LGJul 17, 2025
Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models: Tech Report 2025Ethan Li, Anders Boesen Lindbo Larsen, Chen Zhang et al. · apple-ml, cmu
We introduce two multilingual, multimodal foundation language models that power Apple Intelligence features across Apple devices and services: i a 3B-parameter on-device model optimized for Apple silicon through architectural innovations such as KV-cache sharing and 2-bit quantization-aware training; and ii a scalable server model built on a novel Parallel-Track Mixture-of-Experts PT-MoE transformer that combines track parallelism, mixture-of-experts sparse computation, and interleaved global-local attention to deliver high quality with competitive cost on Apple's Private Cloud Compute platform. Both models are trained on large-scale multilingual and multimodal datasets sourced via responsible web crawling, licensed corpora, and high-quality synthetic data, then further refined with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on a new asynchronous platform. The resulting models support several additional languages while understanding images and executing tool calls. In public benchmarks and human evaluations, both the server model and the on-device model match or surpass comparably sized open baselines. A new Swift-centric Foundation Models framework exposes guided generation, constrained tool calling, and LoRA adapter fine-tuning, allowing developers to integrate these capabilities with a few lines of code. The latest advancements in Apple Intelligence models are grounded in our Responsible AI approach with safeguards like content filtering and locale-specific evaluation, as well as our commitment to protecting our users' privacy with innovations like Private Cloud Compute.
LGAug 29, 2025
Reshaping the Forward-Forward Algorithm with a Similarity-Based ObjectiveJames Gong, Raymond Luo, Emma Wang et al.
Backpropagation is the pivotal algorithm underpinning the success of artificial neural networks, yet it has critical limitations such as biologically implausible backward locking and global error propagation. To circumvent these constraints, the Forward-Forward algorithm was proposed as a more biologically plausible method that replaces the backward pass with an additional forward pass. Despite this advantage, the Forward-Forward algorithm significantly trails backpropagation in accuracy, and its optimal form exhibits low inference efficiency due to multiple forward passes required. In this work, the Forward-Forward algorithm is reshaped through its integration with similarity learning frameworks, eliminating the need for multiple forward passes during inference. This proposed algorithm is named Forward-Forward Algorithm Unified with Similarity-based Tuplet loss (FAUST). Empirical evaluations on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 datasets indicate that FAUST substantially improves accuracy, narrowing the gap with backpropagation. On CIFAR-10, FAUST achieves 56.22\% accuracy with a simple multi-layer perceptron architecture, approaching the backpropagation benchmark of 57.63\% accuracy.
CLDec 19, 2023
Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal ModelsGemini Team, Rohan Anil, Sebastian Borgeaud et al.
This report introduces a new family of multimodal models, Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that our most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks - notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. We believe that the new capabilities of the Gemini family in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases. We discuss our approach toward post-training and deploying Gemini models responsibly to users through services including Gemini, Gemini Advanced, Google AI Studio, and Cloud Vertex AI.