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Apple Ferret-UI: Grounded Mobile UI Understanding with Multimodal LLMs (arxiv.org)
53 points by tosh on Apr 9, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | 7 comments on HN

In plain words: A vision-and-language model for phone screens splits each screen in two and zooms in so tiny icons and text stay readable, learning from labeled tasks like finding text and listing widgets. It beats GPT-4V on every basic screen task tested.

Abstract · Ferret-UI: Grounded Mobile UI Understanding with Multimodal LLMs

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been noteworthy, yet, these general-domain MLLMs often fall short in their ability to comprehend and interact effectively with user interface (UI) screens. In this paper, we present Ferret-UI, a new MLLM tailored for enhanced understanding of mobile UI screens, equipped with referring, grounding, and reasoning capabilities. Given that UI screens typically exhibit a more elongated aspect ratio and contain smaller objects of interest (e.g., icons, texts) than natural images, we incorporate "any resolution" on top of Ferret to magnify details and leverage enhanced visual features. Specifically, each screen is divided into 2 sub-images based on the original aspect ratio (i.e., horizontal division for portrait screens and vertical division for landscape screens). Both sub-images are encoded separately before being sent to LLMs. We meticulously gather training samples from an extensive range of elementary UI tasks, such as icon recognition, find text, and widget listing. These samples are formatted for instruction-following with region annotations to facilitate precise referring and grounding. To augment the model's reasoning ability, we further compile a dataset for advanced tasks, including detailed description, perception/interaction conversations, and function inference. After training on the curated datasets, Ferret-UI exhibits outstanding comprehension of UI screens and the capability to execute open-ended instructions. For model evaluation, we establish a comprehensive benchmark encompassing all the aforementioned tasks. Ferret-UI excels not only beyond most open-source UI MLLMs, but also surpasses GPT-4V on all the elementary UI tasks.

Keen You, Haotian Zhang, Eldon Schoop, Floris Weers, Amanda Swearngin, Jeffrey Nichols, Yinfei Yang, Zhe Gan
arXiv:2404.05719 · cs.CV, cs.CL, cs.HC · submitted Apr 8, 2024
abstract · pdf · html

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This seems to be in the same vein as the Rabbit R1 [0], software, not hardware. I'm very excited to see what Apple comes up with this year and going forward. They are uniquely (possibly along with Google though I'm not as aware of the OS hooks Android provides here) positioned to expose "functions" to their models that apps are already exposing to them for Shortcuts or Siri intents. It doesn't take much imagination to see them offering "Model Intents" (or some better name) where apps expose functions and descriptions of how/when to use them. Giddy doesn't begin to describe how I feel about this.

Apple could also go for the more aggressive approach and allow their model the ability to interact with apps that haven't exposed specific functions. Might be useful for slow moving apps or apps that don't want to be automated. I'm of two mind on that last part. On one hand, as a developer, I can see the potential for abuse but as user I don't want to wait on app developer or wait for an interaction to be "blessed" before I can use it.

For example, I love Prologue [1] (audiobook app using my Plex server) and the developer is quite good about exposing Shortcut actions but there are times where I might want to use Audible for things like WhisperSync. The issue is that Audible doesn't expose the same things I use daily (widget on homescreen to start playing my book where I left off and ability to set a sleep timer via Siri/Shortcuts. I regularly use that to extend a sleep timer while laying in bed if I haven't fallen asleep yet). I'd be interested in being able to use a LLM to add the features I want to the Audible app in those cases.

[0] https://www.rabbit.tech/

[1] https://prologue.audio/

There’s a lot of functionality attached to just associating NSUserActivities[0] with screens (e.g. asking Siri to “remind me about this” will create a reminder with a deep link to that screen attached), which is something that a lot of apps do. I wouldn’t be surprised if this new LLM functionality takes advantage of those in some basic way too, with new APIs being added to allow developers to fine-tune and extend integration as needed.

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsusera...

This might also have applications in screen readers and other accessibility applications, where not having a usable model of UI elements can have consequences considerably beyond convenience.
Apple is dead man walking as a company. They are a decade behind the others in AI. Apple couldn't even manage to build a good enough autocorrect in the iOS keyboard until 2023. What makes anyone believe that this company has any chance of keeping up with the advancements of AI now that it's rapidly iterating on a week-to-week basis. It's not looking pretty for this company. The stock price will crash in a year.
> The stock price will crash in a year.

Sounds like you have a /sure fire/ way to make a lot of money then. Unless, of course, your bloviating isn't based in reality... Let's just ignore the fact that Apple has been using ML for many years now and they almost always take a slower approach to new tech. This isn't odd for them at all. WWDC will be telling one way or the other but from what I can see now I don't feel like Apple can't catch up.

This is a weird take, as if Apple not capitalizing on the AI craze means somehow their core businesses won't be sustainable. I doubt anyone using a Mac will be scrambling for the Windows Copilot Bloat experience, and that's to say nothing of the iPhone. If canceling the car project this far in didn't severely injure them, I don't think sitting on their hands with the AI craze is much of a risk. And I say this as someone who detests Apple.
Still waiting to see a cutting edge AI company turn 19.9 billion USD of profit in a quarter. I guess if you count Google there is a close competitor with more AI stuff?