TLDR:

• AI Research of the Week: Apple Outclasses GPT-4V

• Leaders: My Top Predictions for 2024

🎅 AI Research of the week 🎅

First and foremost, Happy New Year!!

Out of all AI news at the end of 2023, the fact that Apple is finally putting itself out there is probably the most important of all.

Although released back in October, an Apple model named Ferret has been making headlines recently.

Not only is it a first of its kind, but also beats ChatGPT-Vision in several tasks while offering new cues to what Apple may be cooking for the world in 2024.

The Importance of Getting Things Right

Out of all the issues you can face with a Language Model, hallucinations usually come first.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are essentially stochastic word predictors, there is always some certain level of unpredictability in every response they give.

Consequently, when using these models, you must provide the model with relevant context in the actual prompt so that its response isn’t made up.

For instance, if you are preparing a summary of a news event that took place recently and, thus, the model does not know about it, you embed the article directly into the prompt so that the model uses it.

However, while grounding the model on text data is as simple as appending the required data into the prompt, grounding the model on images is a different story.

In other words, what if the necessary ‘cues’ the model needs to answer effectively are objects in an image?

For example, semantically speaking, the response to the question “What can I cook with this” while pointing at a frying pan will be different depending on the ingredients in the table.

As context matters, grounding is essential, yet extremely complex to achieve in multimodal situations.

Adding insult to injury, when pointing to objects in an image to help the MLLM perform better, objects most often have irregular shapes, are partially covered by other objects, or can be poorly visible due to resolution issues.

This makes MLLMs extremely hallucination-prone. But Apple’s Ferret MLLM has a solution for this.

Free-form Referring and Grounding

Put simply, Ferret is the first MLLM that successfully performs referring and grounding on any object in an image in a free-form style.

In other words, it can successfully refer to any object in an image or ground its responses on any object in that image.

All in one model.

As we can see in the image above, the user can point to objects in an image, like the dog, and the model correctly identifies it as a Corgi, establishing spatial relationships between objects, or even performing adversarial predicting.

But GPT-4V can do these things, right?

Yes, but ironically performs worse in many of such instances, despite Ferret being hundreds of times smaller.

But how is this possible?

The key is what Apple researchers define as hybrid representations. It sounds complicated, but it’s not.

When you give an image to a standard Transformer-based computer vision model, it performs what we call the attention mechanism.

It’s a fairly similar process to what ChatGPT does to process a sequence of text, but applying special patterns to account for the structure of the image.

However, unlike humans, which process images pretty intelligently, today’s machines process images by brute force by applying global attention.

For instance, if you look at the image in this link, it has 1 billion pixels. This allows you to see even the most intricate details in buildings hundreds of meters away from the source.

But how long did it take you to figure out which city was that?

As humans apply attention both globally and locally, as soon as you recognize buildings like the Empire State, you know that is New York, and you don’t have to look anywhere else in the picture from that point onwards.

In other words, instead of scrutinizing the billion pixels, you just required a handful of them to acknowledge the place.

Modern frontier models, however, will systematically analyze the whole image, which, considering it’s a billion pixels big, would take huge computational resources and a considerable waste of time.

But while Ferret applies a global attention mechanism, it also includes a free-form localized component that makes it truly unique.

That is, the key behind Ferret’s success is what they define as a spatial-aware visual sampler.

To comprehend what is that, we need to take a look at what Ferret takes in as input:

• An image

• The text prompt

• A visual cue in the form of a pointer, a box, or a free-form shape (like a cat’s tail)

First, as with any default MLLM, an image encoder processes the image to capture its semantics and an embedding lookup does the same for text.

But here is where things get interesting.

Ferret takes the output of the image encoder (the representation of the image) and, using a binary mask, identifies the pixels in the image that fall inside the visual cue.

Next, it inserts both inputs into the spatial-aware visual sampler, which in turn follows a three-step process:

1. It first samples a discrete number of points inside the region

2. Then, using K-neighbors, it identifies proximate points and fuses their features into one

3. Finally, for each set of points, it performs a pooling, aggregating each set into one unique feature that encapsulates the coordinates of the object with the representation of the object, hence the name ‘hybrid’

But what does this all mean?

In layman’s terms, once you indicate the region of study, it performs an additional attention process focused on that area.

In other words, while standard multimodal models will have a unique representation of the whole image, Ferret also has an updated, detailed representation of a certain part of the image.

Additionally, as the original pixel features already include the information about the global attention process done earlier, the model is not only capable of paying close attention to the object in the region, but it also considers the semantics of its surroundings, which in turn allows the model to understand that object in the context of the whole image.

This whole process allows Ferret to have unique capabilities that not even models like ChatGPT have, like free-form selection and, above all, output grounding.

But what do we mean by output grounding?

Put simply, the model can use the context of the image in its response, all the while having considerably fewer hallucinations than other state-of-the-art models like GPT-4V.

Very impressive results you can also check in the original paper, but what cues does this give to us about Apple’s strategy?

Small is Better

With models like Ferret and breakthroughs like last week’s Flash LLMs, it’s clear that Apple has no interest in playing the big model game that Microsoft or Google seem to be all about.

Frankly, it makes total sense, as Apple’s main selling points are consumer-end products that, no matter the innovation, will require tricks and tips to run those models, if ever possible.

But Apple’s impressive results signal that changes are coming to their products pretty soon, by leveraging Ferret-style models for:

• More context-aware image and video editing

• Better Siri interactions

• An improved health offering to support users with questions about their physical wellbeing

And much more, because an improved referring and grounding system like Ferret is essential to making MLLMs production-ready.

Is this Apple’s Year?

Historically, Apple has always been great at not being first in a technological race but eventually taking the victory.

The smartphone, the digital watch, headphones… none of those markets were started by Apple, but everybody knows who eventually won.

Will AI be the same?

🫡 Key contributions 🫡

• Ferret introduces the concept of spatial-aware visual samplers, a component that allows the model to identify key objects in an image and refer or ground its responses to them

• It beats GPT-4V in many tasks despite being hundreds of times smaller

👾 Best news of the week 👾

😍 CaliExpress, the first autonomous restaurant

😎 The rise of context-aware AI assistants

🤨 Three false cases used to defend Donald Trump

🧐 Simon Wilson’s conclusions for 2023

😃 Sam Altman’s list of potential improvements for ChatGPT

🥇 Leaders 🥇

What will happen in 2024?

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