Apple Machine Learning

on Mac with Apple silicon lets AI researchers and developers experiment locally with the latest models and methods in a private environment. The open-source array framework leverages the unified memory architecture of Apple silicon, enabling anyone to run new inference and fine-tuning methods on their own hardware and explore other AI techniques. , we highlighted the advantages of the M5 architecture and its GPU Neural Accelerators.MLXIn a previous post

Multimodal agents commonly generate freeform reasoning before each action. For small models, limited model capacity can result in lengthy reasoning that provides little useful guidance for action generation while incurring substantial inference cost. To address this challenge, we introduce Selection-based Structured Reasoning (SSR), a framework that reformulates reasoning as selection instead of open-ended generation. SSR represents recurring high-level reasoning as pre-specified, reusable natural-language candidates. At each turn, the model selects from the reasoning candidates based on their

Tool-augmented LLM agents discover relevant APIs from large registries before planning execution, yet finite context windows prohibit injecting all tool definitions into a single prompt. The dominant approach, which we term Retrieve-then-Plan (RtP), embeds the user query and retrieves similar tools via approximate nearest-neighbor search. We study an alternative Plan-then-Retrieve (PtR) paradigm in which the LLM first generates Abstract Tool Stubs (hypothesized function signatures describing needed capabilities) which then serve as retrieval queries against the registry. Evaluating on…

Code-switching (CS), the alternation between languages within an utterance, is common in multilingual speech but underrepresented in pretraining corpora. Increasing CS coverage requires finding relevant utterances in large speech collections so that they can be included in training data. One way to find such utterances is to transcribe the speech and detect language alternation in the text, but this depends on obtaining accurate multilingual transcriptions. We propose a lightweight method that detects CS directly from speech. It uses frame-level language information in pretrained speech…

Discrete diffusion models have emerged as strong alternatives to autoregressive language models, with recent work initializing and finetuning a base unimodal model for bi-modal generation. Diverging from previous approaches, we introduce the first tri-modal Masked Diffusion Models (MDM) pretrained from scratch on text, image-text, and audio-text data. We systematically analyze multimodal scaling laws, modality mixing ratios, noise schedules, batch-size effects and provide optimized inference sampling defaults. Our batch-size analysis yields a novel stochastic differential equation (SDE) based…

For most languages of the world, language model pre-training operates in a data-constrained regime where models must repeat their training data many times, degrading generalization. Two remedies exist: aggressive hyperparameter tuning such as high weight decay, and mixing in data from a high-resource auxiliary language to directly aid the low-resource target. While hyperparameter tuning regularizes the model by shrinking weights to restrict network capacity, auxiliary data mixing uses a tunable mixing ratio to expand the training distribution and diversify the training signal with new…

The increasing demand for GPU-accelerated machine learning inference has exposed limitations in centralized GPU infrastructures, including high cost, limited elasticity, and long wait times under resource constraints. At the same time, modern Apple Silicon–based macOS devices are equipped with powerful GPUs that remain largely idle during normal usage. This paper presents Minions, a dynamic and distributed virtual GPU cloud that aggregates idle Apple Silicon GPUs across macOS devices to execute large-scale machine learning inference workloads. Minions enables teams to leverage existing…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are considered to be a more efficient and cost-effective alternative to human judgment for Machine Translation (MT) evaluation. With MT evaluation spanning a large number of language pairs, domains and levels of annotation granularity, LLMs must be thoroughly evaluated across these dimensions before being reliably used as alternatives to human evaluation. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of LLMs for two prominent MT quality evaluation schemes: Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) and Error Span Annotation (ESA) by comparing their agreement with human…

Long agent traces composed of chains of thought and tool calls accumulate stale content that anchor subsequent generations, and eventually outgrow the context window. Existing scaffolds mitigate it with fixed-interval compaction triggered at a token threshold. Such triggers pay no heed to trajectory structure, risking discard of partial results mid-derivation or mid-search. We propose SELFCOMPACT, a scaffold that allows the model itself to decide when and how to compact. Specifically, it pairs two inference-time elements: (i) a compaction tool the model invokes to summarize the accumulated…

Diffusion-based models decompose sampling into many small Gaussian denoising steps, an assumption that breaks down when generation is compressed to a few coarse transitions. Existing few-step methods address this through distillation, consistency training, or adversarial objectives, but sacrifice the likelihood framework in the process. We introduce Normalizing Trajectory Models (NTM), which models each reverse step as an expressive conditional normalizing flow with exact likelihood training. Architecturally, NTM combines shallow invertible blocks within each step with a deep parallel…