Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models

We present foundation language models developed to power Apple Intelligence features, including a ~3 billion parameter model designed to run efficiently on devices and a large server-based language model designed for Private Cloud Compute. These models are designed to perform a wide range of tasks efficiently, accurately, and responsibly. This report describes the model architecture, the data used to train the model, the training process, how the models are optimized for inference, and the evaluation results. We highlight our focus on Responsible AI and how the principles are applied throughout the model development.

DEFN: Dual-Encoder Fourier Group Harmonics Network for Three-Dimensional Macular Hole Reconstruction with Stochastic Retinal Defect Augmentation and Dynamic Weight Composition

The spatial and quantitative parameters of macular holes are vital for diagnosis, surgical choices, and post-op monitoring. Macular hole diagnosis and treatment rely heavily on spatial and quantitative data, yet the scarcity of such data has impeded the progress of deep learning techniques for effective segmentation and real-time 3D reconstruction. To address this challenge, we assembled the world's largest macular hole dataset, Retinal OCTfor Macular Hole Enhancement (ROME-3914), and a Comprehensive Archive for Retinal Segmentation (CARS-30k), both expertly annotated. In addition, we developed an innovative 3D segmentation network, the Dual-Encoder FuGH Network (DEFN), which integrates three innovative modules: Fourier Group Harmonics (FuGH), Simplified 3D Spatial Attention (S3DSA) and Harmonic Squeeze-and-Excitation Module (HSE). These three modules synergistically filter noise, reduce computational complexity, emphasize detailed features, and enhance the network's representation ability. We also proposed a novel data augmentation method, Stochastic Retinal Defect Injection (SRDI), and a network optimization strategy DynamicWeightCompose (DWC), to further improve the performance of DEFN. Compared with 13 baselines, our DEFN shows the best performance. We also offer precise 3D retinal reconstruction and quantitative metrics, bringing revolutionary diagnostic and therapeutic decision-making tools for ophthalmologists, and is expected to completely reshape the diagnosis and treatment patterns of difficult-to-treat macular degeneration. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/IIPL-HangzhouDianUniversity/DEFN-Pytorch.

Change Detection Methods for Remote Sensing in the Last Decade: A Comprehensive Review

Change detection is an essential and widely utilized task in remote sensing that aims to detect and analyze changes occurring in the same geographical area over time, which has broad applications in urban development, agricultural surveys, and land cover monitoring. Detecting changes in remote sensing images is a complex challenge due to various factors, including variations in image quality, noise, registration errors, illumination changes, complex landscapes, and spatial heterogeneity. In recent years, deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool for feature extraction and addressing these challenges. Its versatility has resulted in its widespread adoption for numerous image-processing tasks. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of significant advancements in change detection for remote sensing images over the past decade. We first introduce some preliminary knowledge for the change detection task, such as problem definition, datasets, evaluation metrics, and transformer basics, as well as provide a detailed taxonomy of existing algorithms from three different perspectives: algorithm granularity, supervision modes, and learning frameworks in the methodology section. This survey enables readers to gain systematic knowledge of change detection tasks from various angles. We then summarize the state-of-the-art performance on several dominant change detection datasets, providing insights into the strengths and limitations of existing algorithms. Based on our survey, some future research directions for change detection in remote sensing are well identified. This survey paper will shed some light on the community and inspire further research efforts in the change detection task.

Interpretable Survival Prediction for Colorectal Cancer using Deep Learning

Deriving interpretable prognostic features from deep-learning-based prognostic histopathology models remains a challenge. In this study, we developed a deep learning system (DLS) for predicting disease specific survival for stage II and III colorectal cancer using 3,652 cases (27,300 slides). When evaluated on two validation datasets containing 1,239 cases (9,340 slides) and 738 cases (7,140 slides) respectively, the DLS achieved a 5-year disease-specific survival AUC of 0.70 (95%CI 0.66-0.73) and 0.69 (95%CI 0.64-0.72), and added significant predictive value to a set of 9 clinicopathologic features. To interpret the DLS, we explored the ability of different human-interpretable features to explain the variance in DLS scores. We observed that clinicopathologic features such as T-category, N-category, and grade explained a small fraction of the variance in DLS scores (R2=18% in both validation sets). Next, we generated human-interpretable histologic features by clustering embeddings from a deep-learning based image-similarity model and showed that they explain the majority of the variance (R2 of 73% to 80%). Furthermore, the clustering-derived feature most strongly associated with high DLS scores was also highly prognostic in isolation. With a distinct visual appearance (poorly differentiated tumor cell clusters adjacent to adipose tissue), this feature was identified by annotators with 87.0-95.5% accuracy. Our approach can be used to explain predictions from a prognostic deep learning model and uncover potentially-novel prognostic features that can be reliably identified by people for future validation studies.

Deep learning-based survival prediction for multiple cancer types using histopathology images

Prognostic information at diagnosis has important implications for cancer treatment and monitoring. Although cancer staging, histopathological assessment, molecular features, and clinical variables can provide useful prognostic insights, improving risk stratification remains an active research area. We developed a deep learning system (DLS) to predict disease specific survival across 10 cancer types from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We used a weakly-supervised approach without pixel-level annotations, and tested three different survival loss functions. The DLS was developed using 9,086 slides from 3,664 cases and evaluated using 3,009 slides from 1,216 cases. In multivariable Cox regression analysis of the combined cohort including all 10 cancers, the DLS was significantly associated with disease specific survival (hazard ratio of 1.58, 95% CI 1.28-1.70, p<0.0001) after adjusting for cancer type, stage, age, and sex. In a per-cancer adjusted subanalysis, the DLS remained a significant predictor of survival in 5 of 10 cancer types. Compared to a baseline model including stage, age, and sex, the c-index of the model demonstrated an absolute 3.7% improvement (95% CI 1.0-6.5) in the combined cohort. Additionally, our models stratified patients within individual cancer stages, particularly stage II (p=0.025) and stage III (p<0.001). By developing and evaluating prognostic models across multiple cancer types, this work represents one of the most comprehensive studies exploring the direct prediction of clinical outcomes using deep learning and histopathology images. Our analysis demonstrates the potential for this approach to provide prognostic information in multiple cancer types, and even within specific pathologic stages. However, given the relatively small number of clinical events, we observed wide confidence intervals, suggesting that future work will benefit from larger datasets.

US-net for robust and efficient nuclei instance segmentation

We present a novel neural network architecture, US-Net, for robust nuclei instance segmentation in histopathology images. The proposed framework integrates the nuclei detection and segmentation networks by sharing their outputs through the same foundation network, and thus enhancing the performance of both. The detection network takes into account the high-level semantic cues with contextual information, while the segmentation network focuses more on the low-level details like the edges. Extensive experiments reveal that our proposed framework can strengthen the performance of both branch networks in an integrated architecture and outperforms most of the state-of-the-art nuclei detection and segmentation networks.

GAN-based Virtual Re-Staining: A Promising Solution for Whole Slide Image Analysis

Histopathological cancer diagnosis is based on visual examination of stained tissue slides. Hematoxylin and eosin (H\&E) is a standard stain routinely employed worldwide. It is easy to acquire and cost effective, but cells and tissue components show low-contrast with varying tones of dark blue and pink, which makes difficult visual assessments, digital image analysis, and quantifications. These limitations can be overcome by IHC staining of target proteins of the tissue slide. IHC provides a selective, high-contrast imaging of cells and tissue components, but their use is largely limited by a significantly more complex laboratory processing and high cost. We proposed a conditional CycleGAN (cCGAN) network to transform the H\&E stained images into IHC stained images, facilitating virtual IHC staining on the same slide. This data-driven method requires only a limited amount of labelled data but will generate pixel level segmentation results. The proposed cCGAN model improves the original network \cite{zhu_unpaired_2017} by adding category conditions and introducing two structural loss functions, which realize a multi-subdomain translation and improve the translation accuracy as well. % need to give reasons here. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the original method in unpaired image translation with multi-subdomains. We also explore the potential of unpaired images to image translation method applied on other histology images related tasks with different staining techniques.