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• Apple · Aug 26, 2026

  PROOF-Gen: From Optimized Data to Better Distillation

  Standard distillation pipelines for tool-calling agents use generate-and-filter supervised fine-tuning on teacher trajectories, discarding failed trials and missing training signals on hard scenarios. On τ 2-bench, 57% of teacher trials fail, with two-thirds being near-misses undone by a single error. PROOF-Gen (Per-scenario Reflective Optimization to Overcome Failed Generation) addresses this loss by employing a reflector that reviews execution traces and evaluation feedback to craft corrective guidance for the teacher. Once passing trajectories are generated, this scaffold guidance is stripped so students train on clean demonstrations. Per-scenario prompt optimization recovers 93% of failed scenarios on τ 2-bench, boosting Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 Passˆ1 from 0.132 to 0.529 and lifting deployed on-device model performance across all locales.

• Apple · Aug 26, 2026

  IDEA Prune: An Integrated Enlarge-and-Prune Pipeline in Generative Language Model Pretraining

  Recent advancements in large language models necessitate efficient deployment options within constrained inference budgets. While structured pruning offers better token efficiency than training target-sized models from scratch, previous work frequently ignores the pretraining of enlarged models. To resolve this gap, researchers developed an integrated enlarge-and-prune pipeline that unifies enlarged model training, pruning, and recovery under a single cosine annealing learning rate schedule. This system incorporates an iterative structured pruning technique to gradually eliminate parameters, redistributing model capacity across surviving neurons and avoiding the knowledge loss seen in naive approaches. Evaluated on compressing 2.8B parameter models to 1.3B across up to 2T pretraining tokens, the approach yields superior downstream model performance.

• Apple · Aug 26, 2026

  Luce: Relightable Gaussians for 3D Asset Generation

  High-fidelity image-to-3D asset generation requires 3D representations that capture geometry alongside physically based rendering modalities for seamless pipeline integration and relighting. Luce addresses this challenge by unifying geometry and material properties into a voxelized multimodal Gaussian cloud with dedicated primitives for albedo, metallic-roughness, and surface normals. A variational autoencoder compresses these multimodal primitives into a unified material-aware latent space. A rectified-flow transformer subsequently generates this latent from a single input image using multi-layer features extracted from a pretrained image encoder. On the Toys4K dataset, Luce improves FID by 28% over the leading baseline while maintaining fine details such as text and logos.

• Apple · Aug 25, 2026

  STARFlow2: Bridging Language Models and Normalizing Flows for Unified Multimodal Generation

  Existing multimodal models struggle with structural fragmentation, often sacrificing visual fidelity via discrete tokenization or breaking structural symmetry by pairing causal text generation with diffusion-based denoising. STARFlow2 addresses these limitations by leveraging autoregressive normalizing flows, which share the causal mask, key-value cache mechanism, and left-to-right structure of large language models. Built upon the Pretzel architecture, the system vertically interleaves a frozen pretrained vision-language model stream with a TARFlow stream through residual skip connections under a single causal mask. A deep-shallow flow design combined with a unified FAE latent space allows both text and continuous visual outputs to enter the key-value cache directly without re-encoding. Benchmark experiments validate strong performance across multimodal understanding and continuous image generation tasks.

• Apple · Aug 24, 2026

  Beyond Visual CoT: Internalized Visual Thinking for Proactive Video Reasoning

  Visual chain-of-thought methods allow multimodal large language models to reason through intermediate image generation, but synthesizing explicit visual steps creates major inference overhead during proactive video reasoning. To eliminate runtime synthesis, Internalized Visual Thinking introduces a post-training framework that jointly optimizes textual prediction and next-embedding prediction across unlabeled videos. By predicting latent representations of future frames alongside target text answers during training, the model captures motion, object transitions, interactions, and latent intent. At inference time, the model produces answers directly without generating or re-encoding future frames. IVT outperforms text-only post-training across six evaluation settings while matching or exceeding Visual CoT performance and cutting end-to-end latency by more than 5x.

• Apple · Aug 20, 2026

  Multilingual Knowledge Transfer under Data Constraints via Lexical Interventions

  Cross-lingual knowledge transfer is critical for training multilingual language models when target-language data is scarce and downstream tasks demand reasoning or world knowledge. Existing transfer approaches often depend on scarce resources such as large parallel corpora, translation systems, auxiliary models, or extra training phases. To address this limitation, the authors introduce LINK, a data-level intervention method that operates directly during pretraining via bilingual vocabularies. LINK swaps randomly selected words in a portion of the high-resource English corpus with word-level translations according to a specified replacement ratio. Across evaluations spanning eight languages and five model sizes, the technique delivered notable performance gains on downstream target-language tasks while achieving up to a 2x speedup in training to reach equivalent performance.

• Apple · Aug 20, 2026

  Scaling Laws for Mixture Pretraining Under Data Constraints

  Scaling language models demands large volumes of data, but high-value target sources like low-resource languages and specialized domains remain inherently scarce. Practitioners frequently combine limited target data with abundant generic data, creating a balance between domain underexposure and excessive repetition leading to overfitting. An empirical evaluation across more than 2,000 language-model training runs demonstrates that mixture training tolerates substantially higher data repetition than single-source training, allowing scarce target corpora to be repeated 15 to 20 times. Researchers introduced a repetition-aware mixture scaling law that accounts for both the diminishing returns of repeated target tokens and the regularizing effect of generic data. Optimizing this scaling law offers a principled framework for calculating effective mixture configurations and practical pretraining recommendations under severe data constraints.

• Apple · Aug 20, 2026

  Progressive Refinement: An Iterative Pseudo-Labeling Approach for Mandarin-English Code-Switching ASR

  Code-switching automatic speech recognition faces major performance challenges due to the scarcity of code-switching training data. To mitigate this data limitation, an iterative pseudo-labeling framework leverages a large unlabeled audio corpus to generate semi-supervised speech datasets. The system structure executes across three sequential phases: pseudo-label generation, two-stage bilingual model pre-training with supervised code-switching fine-tuning, and progressive iterative improvements. Successive refinement cycles further enhance the neural model's recognition accuracy when processing complex code-switching scenarios across alternating languages. When evaluated on the SEAME benchmark, this training pipeline achieved Mix Error Rate reductions of 6.35 percent on the devman subset and 8.29 percent on the devsge subset.

• Apple · Aug 19, 2026

  Examining Human-Like Behaviors in LLMs: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Model Behaviors, User Factors, and System Prompts

  Large language models frequently exhibit human-like behaviors such as expressing emotions, building relationships, and setting boundaries, yet empirical guidance on appropriate usage remains limited. To address this gap, researchers analyzed 21,000 multi-turn conversations across four models: gpt-4o, gpt-4.1-mini, claude-sonnet-4.6, and gemini-2.5-flash. The study combined LLM-as-a-judge techniques with human evaluation to measure behavior prevalence, perceived appropriateness, and prompt controllability across diverse user goals and profiles. Human evaluators judged LLM self-referential and relationship-building behaviors as less appropriate than identical human actions, whereas boundary-maintaining behaviors were rated as more appropriate for models. System prompting effectively steered these behaviors, though the authors emphasize that rigorous evaluation remains necessary to prevent unintended side effects.

• Apple · Aug 19, 2026

  The P-Completeness of Inverted Index Traversal: On the Complexity of Evaluating Boolean Query DAGs

  Modern artificial intelligence agents increasingly rely on search infrastructure to run complex, neuro-symbolic reasoning workflows that compile into deeply nested, non-monotonic Boolean queries. Standard inverted index evaluation methods struggle with these query structures, facing either exponential query complexity under Document-at-a-Time models or universe-scale space penalties under Term-at-a-Time models during logical negation. To address these theoretical limitations, the author formalizes a DAG-based retrieval language named L_R and proves its query evaluation problem is strictly P-Complete. The paper introduces ComputePN, a deterministic and sparsity-aware algorithm that employs a Positive-Negative dual representation alongside native DAG memoization. This mechanism bounds evaluation time to O(|Q| · |U_active|), effectively evaluating P-Complete queries natively over the index while bypassing combinatorial tree expansion and universal scan overhead.