Colorado Reed

Kevin Miao, Akash Gokul, Raghav Singh et al.

Recent trends in self-supervised representation learning have focused on removing inductive biases from training pipelines. However, inductive biases can be useful in settings when limited data are available or provide additional insight into the underlying data distribution. We present spatial prior attention (SPAN), a framework that takes advantage of consistent spatial and semantic structure in unlabeled image datasets to guide Vision Transformer attention. SPAN operates by regularizing attention masks from separate transformer heads to follow various priors over semantic regions. These priors can be derived from data statistics or a single labeled sample provided by a domain expert. We study SPAN through several detailed real-world scenarios, including medical image analysis and visual quality assurance. We find that the resulting attention masks are more interpretable than those derived from domain-agnostic pretraining. SPAN produces a 58.7 mAP improvement for lung and heart segmentation. We also find that our method yields a 2.2 mAUC improvement compared to domain-agnostic pretraining when transferring the pretrained model to a downstream chest disease classification task. Lastly, we show that SPAN pretraining leads to higher downstream classification performance in low-data regimes compared to domain-agnostic pretraining.

Tom Gunter, Zirui Wang, Chong Wang et al.

We present foundation language models developed to power Apple Intelligence features, including a ~3 billion parameter model designed to run efficiently on devices and a large server-based language model designed for Private Cloud Compute. These models are designed to perform a wide range of tasks efficiently, accurately, and responsibly. This report describes the model architecture, the data used to train the model, the training process, how the models are optimized for inference, and the evaluation results. We highlight our focus on Responsible AI and how the principles are applied throughout the model development.

Junyan Li, Yang Zhang, Muhammad Yusuf Hassan et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in applications requiring long context lengths, but the key-value (KV) cache often becomes a memory bottleneck on GPUs as context grows. To address this, we propose Commutative Vector Quantization (CommVQ) to significantly reduce memory usage for long-context LLM inference. We first introduce additive quantization with a lightweight encoder and codebook to compress the KV cache, which can be decoded via simple matrix multiplication. To further reduce computational costs during decoding, we design the codebook to be commutative with Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) and train it using an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. This enables efficient integration of decoding into the self-attention mechanism. Our approach achieves high accuracy with additive quantization and low overhead via the RoPE-commutative codebook. Experiments on long-context benchmarks and GSM8K show that our method reduces FP16 KV cache size by 87.5% with 2-bit quantization, while outperforming state-of-the-art KV cache quantization methods. Notably, it enables 1-bit KV cache quantization with minimal accuracy loss, allowing a LLaMA-3.1 8B model to run with a 128K context length on a single RTX 4090 GPU. The source code is available at: https://github.com/UMass-Embodied-AGI/CommVQ.

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.

Poonam Parhar, Ryan Sawasaki, Alberto Todeschini et al.

With the effects of global climate change impacting the world, collective efforts are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The energy sector is the single largest contributor to climate change and many efforts are focused on reducing dependence on carbon-emitting power plants and moving to renewable energy sources, such as solar power. A comprehensive database of the location of solar panels is important to assist analysts and policymakers in defining strategies for further expansion of solar energy. In this paper we focus on creating a world map of solar panels. We identify locations and total surface area of solar panels within a given geographic area. We use deep learning methods for automated detection of solar panel locations and their surface area using aerial imagery. The framework, which consists of a two-branch model using an image classifier in tandem with a semantic segmentation model, is trained on our created dataset of satellite images. Our work provides an efficient and scalable method for detecting solar panels, achieving an accuracy of 0.96 for classification and an IoU score of 0.82 for segmentation performance.

Xiangyu Yue, Zangwei Zheng, Colorado Reed et al.

Multi-source Domain Adaptation (MDA) aims to transfer predictive models from multiple, fully-labeled source domains to an unlabeled target domain. However, in many applications, relevant labeled source datasets may not be available, and collecting source labels can be as expensive as labeling the target data itself. In this paper, we investigate Multi-source Few-shot Domain Adaptation (MFDA): a new domain adaptation scenario with limited multi-source labels and unlabeled target data. As we show, existing methods often fail to learn discriminative features for both source and target domains in the MFDA setting. Therefore, we propose a novel framework, termed Multi-Source Few-shot Adaptation Network (MSFAN), which can be trained end-to-end in a non-adversarial manner. MSFAN operates by first using a type of prototypical, multi-domain, self-supervised learning to learn features that are not only domain-invariant but also class-discriminative. Second, MSFAN uses a small, labeled support set to enforce feature consistency and domain invariance across domains. Finally, prototypes from multiple sources are leveraged to learn better classifiers. Compared with state-of-the-art MDA methods, MSFAN improves the mean classification accuracy over different domain pairs on MFDA by 20.2%, 9.4%, and 16.2% on Office, Office-Home, and DomainNet, respectively.

Chitra Agastya, Sirak Ghebremusse, Ian Anderson et al.

Climate change has caused reductions in river runoffs and aquifer recharge resulting in an increasingly unsustainable crop water demand from reduced freshwater availability. Achieving food security while deploying water in a sustainable manner will continue to be a major challenge necessitating careful monitoring and tracking of agricultural water usage. Historically, monitoring water usage has been a slow and expensive manual process with many imperfections and abuses. Ma-chine learning and remote sensing developments have increased the ability to automatically monitor irrigation patterns, but existing techniques often require curated and labelled irrigation data, which are expensive and time consuming to obtain and may not exist for impactful areas such as developing countries. In this paper, we explore an end-to-end real world application of irrigation detection with uncurated and unlabeled satellite imagery. We apply state-of-the-art self-supervised deep learning techniques to optical remote sensing data, and find that we are able to detect irrigation with up to nine times better precision, 90% better recall and 40% more generalization ability than the traditional supervised learning methods.

Sicheng Zhao, Bo Li, Colorado Reed et al.

In many practical applications, it is often difficult and expensive to obtain enough large-scale labeled data to train deep neural networks to their full capability. Therefore, transferring the learned knowledge from a separate, labeled source domain to an unlabeled or sparsely labeled target domain becomes an appealing alternative. However, direct transfer often results in significant performance decay due to domain shift. Domain adaptation (DA) addresses this problem by minimizing the impact of domain shift between the source and target domains. Multi-source domain adaptation (MDA) is a powerful extension in which the labeled data may be collected from multiple sources with different distributions. Due to the success of DA methods and the prevalence of multi-source data, MDA has attracted increasing attention in both academia and industry. In this survey, we define various MDA strategies and summarize available datasets for evaluation. We also compare modern MDA methods in the deep learning era, including latent space transformation and intermediate domain generation. Finally, we discuss future research directions for MDA.

Colorado Reed, Zoubin Ghahramani

Inference for latent feature models is inherently difficult as the inference space grows exponentially with the size of the input data and number of latent features. In this work, we use Kurihara & Welling (2008)'s maximization-expectation framework to perform approximate MAP inference for linear-Gaussian latent feature models with an Indian Buffet Process (IBP) prior. This formulation yields a submodular function of the features that corresponds to a lower bound on the model evidence. By adding a constant to this function, we obtain a nonnegative submodular function that can be maximized via a greedy algorithm that obtains at least a one-third approximation to the optimal solution. Our inference method scales linearly with the size of the input data, and we show the efficacy of our method on the largest datasets currently analyzed using an IBP model.