On Information Geometry and Iterative Optimization in Model Compression: Operator Factorization

The ever-increasing parameter counts of deep learning models necessitate effective compression techniques for deployment on resource-constrained devices. This paper explores the application of information geometry, the study of density-induced metrics on parameter spaces, to analyze existing methods within the space of model compression, primarily focusing on operator factorization. Adopting this perspective highlights the core challenge: defining an optimal low-compute submanifold (or subset) and projecting onto it. We argue that many successful model compression approaches can be understood…Apple Machine Learning Research

On the Way to LLM Personalization: Learning to Remember User Conversations

This paper was accepted at the Workshop on Large Language Model Memorization (L2M2) 2025.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have quickly become an invaluable assistant for a variety of tasks. However, their effectiveness is constrained by their ability to tailor responses to human preferences and behaviors via personalization. Prior work in LLM personalization has largely focused on style transfer or incorporating small factoids about the user, as knowledge injection remains an open challenge. In this paper, we explore injecting knowledge of prior conversations into LLMs to enable future work on…Apple Machine Learning Research

ASPERA: A Simulated Environment to Evaluate Planning for Complex Action Execution

This work evaluates the potential of large language models (LLMs) to power digital assistants capable of complex action execution. These assistants rely on pre-trained programming knowledge to execute multi-step goals by composing objects and functions defined in assistant libraries into action execution programs. To achieve this, we develop ASPERA, a framework comprising an assistant library simulation and a human-assisted LLM data generation engine. Our engine allows developers to guide LLM generation of high-quality tasks consisting of complex user queries, simulation state and…Apple Machine Learning Research

mRAKL: Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Graph Construction for Low-Resourced Languages

Knowledge Graphs represent real-world entities and the relationships between them. Multilingual Knowledge Graph Construction (mKGC) refers to the task of automatically constructing or predicting missing entities and links for knowledge graphs in a multilingual setting. In this work, we reformulate the mKGC task as a Question Answering (QA) task and introduce mRAKL: a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based system to perform mKGC. We achieve this by using the head entity and linking relation in a question, and having our model predict the tail entity as an answer. Our experiments focus…Apple Machine Learning Research

Can External Validation Tools Can Improve Annotation Quality for LLM-as-a-Judge

Pairwise preferences over model responses are widely collected to evaluate and provide feedback to large language models (LLMs). Given two alternative model responses to the same input, a human or AI annotator selects the “better” response. Such data can provide a feedback signal in domains where traditional hard-coded metrics are difficult to obtain (e.g. quality of a chat interactions), thereby helping measure model progress or model fine-tuning (e.g., via reinforcement learning from human feedback, RLHF). However, for some domains it can be tricky to obtain such pairwise comparisons in…Apple Machine Learning Research

MMAU: A Holistic Benchmark of Agent Capabilities Across Diverse Domains

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have increased the demand for comprehensive benchmarks to evaluate their capabilities as human-like agents. Existing benchmarks, while useful, often focus on specific application scenarios, emphasizing task completion but failing to dissect the underlying skills that drive these outcomes. This lack of granularity makes it difficult to deeply discern where failures stem from. Additionally, setting up these environments requires considerable effort, and issues of unreliability and reproducibility sometimes arise, especially in interactive tasks. To…Apple Machine Learning Research

Apple Workshop on Human-Centered Machine Learning 2024

A human-centered approach to machine learning (HCML) involves designing ML machine learning & AI technology that prioritizes the needs and values of the people using it. This leads to AI that complements and enhances human capabilities, rather than replacing them. Research in the area of HCML includes the development of transparent and interpretable machine learning systems to help people feel safer using AI, as well as strategies for predicting and preventing potentially negative societal impacts of the technology. The human-centered approach to ML aligns with our focus on responsible AI…Apple Machine Learning Research

FastVLM: Efficient Vision Encoding for Vision Language Models

Vision Language Models (VLMs) enable visual understanding alongside textual inputs. They are typically built by passing visual tokens from a pretrained vision encoder to a pretrained Large Language Model (LLM) through a projection layer. By leveraging the rich visual representations of the vision encoder and the world knowledge and reasoning capabilities of the LLM, VLMs can be useful for a wide range of applications, including accessibility assistants, UI navigation, robotics, and gaming.
VLM accuracy generally improves with higher input image resolution, creating a tradeoff between accuracy…Apple Machine Learning Research

Boolformer: Symbolic Regression of Logic Functions with Transformers

This paper was accepted at the 2nd AI for Math Workshop at ICML 2025.
We introduce Boolformer, a Transformer-based model trained to perform end-to-end symbolic regression of Boolean functions. First, we show that it can predict compact formulas for complex functions not seen during training, given their full truth table. Then, we demonstrate that even with incomplete or noisy observations, Boolformer is still able to find good approximate expressions. We evaluate Boolformer on a broad set of real-world binary classification datasets, demonstrating its potential as an interpretable alternative…Apple Machine Learning Research