Research Highlights

Ratings and reviews are an invaluable resource for users exploring an app on the App Store, providing insights into how others have experienced the app. With review summaries now available in iOS 18.4, users can quickly get a high-level overview of what other users think about an app, while still having the option to dive into individual reviews for more detail. This feature is powered by a novel, multi-step LLM-based system that periodically...

At Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right. And we believe in giving our users a great experience while protecting their privacy. For years, we’ve used techniques like differential privacy as part of our opt-in device analytics program. This lets us gain insights into how our products are used, so we can improve them, while protecting user privacy by preventing...

Accelerating LLM inference is an important ML research problem, as auto-regressive token generation is computationally expensive and relatively slow, and improving inference efficiency can reduce latency for users. In addition to ongoing efforts to accelerate inference on Apple silicon, we have recently made significant progress in accelerating LLM inference for the NVIDIA GPUs widely used for production applications across the industry.

Many app developers are interested in building on device experiences that integrate increasingly capable large language models (LLMs). Running these models locally on Apple silicon enables developers to leverage the capabilities of the user's device for cost-effective inference, without sending data to and from third party servers, which also helps protect user privacy. In order to do this, the models must be carefully optimized to effectively...

Machine Translation (MT) enables people to connect with others and engage with content across language barriers. Grammatical gender presents a difficult challenge for these systems, as some languages require specificity for terms that can be ambiguous or neutral in other languages. For example, when translating the English word "nurse" into Spanish, one must decide whether the feminine "enfermera" or the masculine "enfermero" is appropriate....