Ransen Niu

Paul Upchurch, Ransen Niu

A key algorithm for understanding the world is material segmentation, which assigns a label (metal, glass, etc.) to each pixel. We find that a model trained on existing data underperforms in some settings and propose to address this with a large-scale dataset of 3.2 million dense segments on 44,560 indoor and outdoor images, which is 23x more segments than existing data. Our data covers a more diverse set of scenes, objects, viewpoints and materials, and contains a more fair distribution of skin types. We show that a model trained on our data outperforms a state-of-the-art model across datasets and viewpoints. We propose a large-scale scene parsing benchmark and baseline of 0.729 per-pixel accuracy, 0.585 mean class accuracy and 0.420 mean IoU across 46 materials.

Ethan 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.