Jinhao Lei

Rajiv Movva, Jinhao Lei, Shayne Longpre et al.

Quantization, knowledge distillation, and magnitude pruning are among the most popular methods for neural network compression in NLP. Independently, these methods reduce model size and can accelerate inference, but their relative benefit and combinatorial interactions have not been rigorously studied. For each of the eight possible subsets of these techniques, we compare accuracy vs. model size tradeoffs across six BERT architecture sizes and eight GLUE tasks. We find that quantization and distillation consistently provide greater benefit than pruning. Surprisingly, except for the pair of pruning and quantization, using multiple methods together rarely yields diminishing returns. Instead, we observe complementary and super-multiplicative reductions to model size. Our work quantitatively demonstrates that combining compression methods can synergistically reduce model size, and that practitioners should prioritize (1) quantization, (2) knowledge distillation, and (3) pruning to maximize accuracy vs. model size tradeoffs.

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.

Mark Lee, Tom Gunter, Chang Lan et al.

We design and implement AXLearn, a production deep learning system that facilitates scalable and high-performance training of large deep learning models. Compared to other state-of-the-art deep learning systems, AXLearn has a unique focus on modularity and support for heterogeneous hardware infrastructure. AXLearn's internal interfaces between software components follow strict encapsulation, allowing different components to be assembled to facilitate rapid model development and experimentation on heterogeneous compute infrastructure. We introduce a novel method of quantifying modularity via Lines-of-Code (LoC)-complexity, which demonstrates how our system maintains constant complexity as we scale the components in the system, compared to linear or quadratic complexity in other systems. This allows integrating features such as Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) into AXLearn across hundred of modules with just 10 lines of code, compared to hundreds as required in other systems. At the same time, AXLearn maintains equivalent performance compared to state-of-the-art training systems. Finally, we share our experience in the development and operation of AXLearn.

Iddo Drori, Darshan Thaker, Arjun Srivatsa et al.

Proteins are the major building blocks of life, and actuators of almost all chemical and biophysical events in living organisms. Their native structures in turn enable their biological functions which have a fundamental role in drug design. This motivates predicting the structure of a protein from its sequence of amino acids, a fundamental problem in computational biology. In this work, we demonstrate state-of-the-art protein structure prediction (PSP) results using embeddings and deep learning models for prediction of backbone atom distance matrices and torsion angles. We recover 3D coordinates of backbone atoms and reconstruct full atom protein by optimization. We create a new gold standard dataset of proteins which is comprehensive and easy to use. Our dataset consists of amino acid sequences, Q8 secondary structures, position specific scoring matrices, multiple sequence alignment co-evolutionary features, backbone atom distance matrices, torsion angles, and 3D coordinates. We evaluate the quality of our structure prediction by RMSD on the latest Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) test data and demonstrate competitive results with the winning teams and AlphaFold in CASP13 and supersede the results of the winning teams in CASP12. We make our data, models, and code publicly available.

Qiao Qian, Minlie Huang, Jinhao Lei et al.

Sentiment understanding has been a long-term goal of AI in the past decades. This paper deals with sentence-level sentiment classification. Though a variety of neural network models have been proposed very recently, however, previous models either depend on expensive phrase-level annotation, whose performance drops substantially when trained with only sentence-level annotation; or do not fully employ linguistic resources (e.g., sentiment lexicons, negation words, intensity words), thus not being able to produce linguistically coherent representations. In this paper, we propose simple models trained with sentence-level annotation, but also attempt to generating linguistically coherent representations by employing regularizers that model the linguistic role of sentiment lexicons, negation words, and intensity words. Results show that our models are effective to capture the sentiment shifting effect of sentiment, negation, and intensity words, while still obtain competitive results without sacrificing the models' simplicity.