At WWDC25 we launched a new type of Lab event for the developer community - Group Labs. A Group Lab is a panel Q&A designed for a large audience of developers. Group Labs are a unique opportunity for the community to submit questions directly to a panel of Apple engineers and designers. Here are the highlights from the WWDC25 Group Lab for Machine Learning and AI Frameworks. What are you most excited about in the Foundation Models framework? The Foundation Models framework provides access to an on-device Large Language Model (LLM), enabling entirely on-device processing for intelligent features. This allows you to build features such as personalized search suggestions and dynamic NPC generation in games. The combination of guided generation and streaming capabilities is particularly exciting for creating delightful animations and features with reliable output. The seamless integration with SwiftUI and the new design material Liquid Glass is also a major advantage. When should I still bring my own LLM via CoreML? It's generally recommended to first explore Apple's built-in system models and APIs, including the Foundation Models framework, as they are highly optimized for Apple devices and cover a wide range of use cases. However, Core ML is still valuable if you need more control or choice over the specific model being deployed, such as customizing existing system models or augmenting prompts. Core ML provides the tools to get these models on-device, but you are responsible for model distribution and updates. Should I migrate PyTorch code to MLX? MLX is an open-source, general-purpose machine learning framework designed for Apple Silicon from the ground up. It offers a familiar API, similar to PyTorch, and supports C, C++, Python, and Swift. MLX emphasizes unified memory, a key feature of Apple Silicon hardware, which can improve performance. It's recommended to try MLX and see if its programming model and features better suit your application's needs. MLX shines when working with state-of-the-art, larger models. Can I test Foundation Models in Xcode simulator or device? Yes, you can use the Xcode simulator to test Foundation Models use cases. However, your Mac must be running macOS Tahoe. You can test on a physical iPhone running iOS 18 by connecting it to your Mac and running Playgrounds or live previews directly on the device. Which on-device models will be supported? any open source models? The Foundation Models framework currently supports Apple's first-party models only. This allows for platform-wide optimizations, improving battery life and reducing latency. While Core ML can be used to integrate open-source models, it's generally recommended to first explore the built-in system models and APIs provided by Apple, including those in the Vision, Natural Language, and Speech frameworks, as they are highly optimized for Apple devices. For frontier models, MLX can run very large models. How often will the Foundational Model be updated? How do we test for stability when the model is updated? The Foundation Model will be updated in sync with operating system updates. You can test your app against new model versions during the beta period by downloading the beta OS and running your app. It is highly recommended to create an "eval set" of golden prompts and responses to evaluate the performance of your features as the model changes or as you tweak your prompts. Report any unsatisfactory or satisfactory cases using Feedback Assistant. Which on-device model/API can I use to extract text data from images such as: nutrition labels, ingredient lists, cashier receipts, etc? Thank you. The Vision framework offers the RecognizeDocumentRequest which is specifically designed for these use cases. It not only recognizes text in images but also provides the structure of the document, such as rows in a receipt or the layout of a nutrition label. It can also identify data like phone numbers, addresses, and prices. What is the context window for the model? What are max tokens in and max tokens out? The context window for the Foundation Model is 4,096 tokens. The split between input and output tokens is flexible. For example, if you input 4,000 tokens, you'll have 96 tokens remaining for the output. The API takes in text, converting it to tokens under the hood. When estimating token count, a good rule of thumb is 3-4 characters per token for languages like English, and 1 character per token for languages like Japanese or Chinese. Handle potential errors gracefully by asking for shorter prompts or starting a new session if the token limit is exceeded. Is there a rate limit for Foundation Models API that is limited by power or temperature condition on the iPhone? Yes, there are rate limits, particularly when your app is in the background. A budget is allocated for background app usage, but exceeding it will result in rate-limiting errors. In the foreground, there is no rate limit unless the device is under heavy load (e.g., camera open, game mode). The system dynamically balances performance, battery life, and thermal conditions, which can affect the token throughput. Use appropriate quality of service settings for your tasks (e.g., background priority for background work) to help the system manage resources effectively. Do the foundation models support languages other than English? Yes, the on-device Foundation Model is multilingual and supports all languages supported by Apple Intelligence. To get the model to output in a specific language, prompt it with instructions indicating the user's preferred language using the locale API (e.g., "The user's preferred language is en-US"). Putting the instructions in English, but then putting the user prompt in the desired output language is a recommended practice. Are larger server-based models available through Foundation Models? No, the Foundation Models API currently only provides access to the on-device Large Language Model at the core of Apple Intelligence. It does not support server-side models. On-device models are preferred for privacy and for performance reasons. Is it possible to run Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) using the Foundation Models framework? Yes, it is possible to run RAG on-device, but the Foundation Models framework does not include a built-in embedding model. You'll need to use a separate database to store vectors and implement nearest neighbor or cosine distance searches. The Natural Language framework offers simple word and sentence embeddings that can be used. Consider using a combination of Foundation Models and Core ML, using Core ML for your embedding model.

Hi all, I'm trying to find out if/when we can expect mxfp8/mxfp4 support on Apple Silicon. I've noticed that mlx now has casting data types, but all computation is still done in bf16. Would be great to reduce power consumption with support for these lower precision data types since edge inference is already typically done at a lower precision! Thanks in advance.

I am using gemini2.5-flash with SwiftUI. How can I receive a response in JSON?

The documentation for the Create ML tool ("Building an object detector data source") mentions that there are options for using normalized values instead of pixels and also different anchor point origins ("MLBoundingBoxCoordinatesOrigin") instead of always using "center". However, the JSON format for these does not appear in any examples. Does anyone know the format for these options?

Hi, guys. I'm writing about Apple Intelligence and I reached the point I have to explain App Intent Domains https://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppIntents/app-intent-domains but I noticed that there is a note explaining that these services are not available with Siri. I tried the example provided by Apple at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppIntents/making-your-app-s-functionality-available-to-siri and I can only make the intents work from the Shortcuts App, but not from Siri. Is this correct. App Intent Domains are still not available with Siri? Thanks

I followed below url for converting Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct model but always fails even i have 64GB of free space after downloading model from huggingface. https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/core-ml-on-device-llama Also tried with other models Llama-3.1-1B-Instruct & Llama-3.1-3B-Instruct models those are converted but while doing performance test in xcode fails for all compunits. Is there any source code to run llama models in ios app.

Hello. I am willing to hire game developer for cards game called baloot. My question is Can the developer implement an AI when the computer is playing and the computer on the same time the conputer improves his rises level without any interaction? 🌹

Hello, I have a question regarding hybrid execution for deep learning models on Apple's Neural Engine and CPU. I am aware that setting the precision of some layers to 32-bit allows hybrid execution across both the Neural Engine and the CPU. However, I would like to know if it is possible to achieve the same with 16-bit precision. Is there any specific configuration or workaround to enable hybrid execution in this case? Any guidance or documentation references would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

@property (assign,nonatomic) long long experimentalMLE5EngineUsage; //@synthesize experimentalMLE5EngineUsage=_experimentalMLE5EngineUsage - In the implementation block What is it, and why would disabling it fix NMS for a MLProgram? Is there anyway to signal this flag from model metadata? Is there anyway to signal or disable from a global, system-level scope? It's extremely easy to reproduce, but do not know how to investigate the drastic regression between toggling this flag let config = MLModelConfiguration() config.setValue(1, forKey: "experimentalMLE5EngineUsage")

I got 3203.23 GFLOPS (FP16) on the M3 Macbook Pro and only 2833.24 GFLOPS (FP16) on the M4 Macbook Air for 4096x4096 matrix multiplications for a PyTorch MPS FP16 Benchmark. Wasn't the performance supposed to be twice as high on the M4 compared to the M3 even with the termal throtling on the Macbook Air? What went wrong?

I would like to make use of create ML to classify a motion. However, it seems it requires 2 classes at least to train or test it. What should I do as I only has 1 class (the target motion). Also, how to interpret the 'Recall' and 'F1 Score'

Hi team, I’m exploring the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is used to connect LLMs/AI agents to external tools in a structured way. It's becoming a common standard for automation and agent workflows. Before I go deeper, I want to confirm: Does Apple currently provide any official MCP server, API surface, or SDK on iOS/macOS? From what I see, only third-party MCP servers exist for iOS simulators/devices, and Apple’s own frameworks (Foundation Models, Apple Intelligence) don’t expose MCP endpoints. Is there any chance Apple might introduce MCP support—or publish recommended patterns for safely integrating MCP inside apps or developer tools? I would like to see if I can share my app's data to the MCP server to enable other third-party apps/services to integrate easily

In this WWDC25 session, it is explictely mentioned that apps should support AttributedString for text parameters to their App Intents. However, I have not gotten this to work. Whenever I pass rich text (either generated by the new "Use Model" intent or generated manually for example using "Make Rich Text from Markdown"), my Intent gets an AttributedString with the correct characters, but with all attributes stripped (so in effect just plain text). struct TestIntent: AppIntent { static var title = LocalizedStringResource(stringLiteral: "Test Intent") static var description = IntentDescription("Tests Attributed Strings in Intent Parameters.") @Parameter var text: AttributedString func perform() async throws -> some IntentResult & ReturnsValue<AttributedString> { return .result(value: text) } } Is there anything else I am missing?

I’m keep looking around documentation and some sample codes but still haven’t found example of how was used this type of Network Regressor . Does it take some special parameters to perform on ANE , what size,format of DataFrame ?

I have seen inconsistent results for my Colab machine learning notebooks running locally on a Mac M4, compared to running the same notebook code on either T4 (in Colab) or a RTX3090 locally. To illustrate the problems I have set up a notebook that implements two simple CNN models that solves the Fashion-MNIST problem. https://colab.research.google.com/drive/11BhtHhN079-BWqv9QvvcSD9U4mlVSocB?usp=sharing For the good model with 2M parameters I get the following results: T4 (Colab, JAX): Test accuracy: 0.925 3090 (Local PC via ssh tunnel, Jax): Test accuracy: 0.925 Mac M4 (Local, JAX): Test accuracy: 0.893 Mac M4 (Local, Tensorflow): Test accuracy: 0.893 That is, I see a significant drop in performance when I run on the Mac M4 compared to the NVIDIA machines, and it seems to be independent of backend. I however do not know how to pinpoint this to either Keras or Apple’s METAL implementation. I have reported this to Keras: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/11BhtHhN079-BWqv9QvvcSD9U4mlVSocB?usp=sharing but as this can be (likely is?) an Apple Metal issue, I wanted to report this here as well. On the mac I am running the following Python libraries: keras 3.9.1 tensorflow 2.19.0 tensorflow-metal 1.2.0 jax 0.5.3 jax-metal 0.1.1 jaxlib 0.5.3

Hi, I'm currently using Metal Performance Shaders Graph (MPSGraphExecutable) to run neural network inference operations as part of a metal rendering pipeline. I also tried to profile the usage of neural engine when running inference using MPSGraphExecutable but the graph shows no sign of neural engine usage. However, when I used the coreML model inspection tool in xcode and run performance report, it was able to use ANE. Does MPSGraphExecutable automatically utilize the Apple Neural Engine (ANE) when running inference operations, or does it only execute on GPU? My model (Core ML Package) was converted from a pytouch model using coremltools with ML program type and support iOS17.0+. Any insights or documentation references would be greatly appreciated!

In this online session, you can code along with us as we build generative AI features into a sample app live in Xcode. We'll guide you through implementing core features like basic text generation, as well as advanced topics like guided generation for structured data output, streaming responses for dynamic UI updates, and tool calling to retrieve data or take an action. Check out these resources to get started: Download the project files: https://developer.apple.com/events/re... Explore the code along guide: https://developer.apple.com/events/re... Join the live Q&A: https://developer.apple.com/videos/pl... Agenda – All times PDT 10 a.m.: Welcome and Xcode setup 10:15 a.m.: Framework basics, guided generation, and building prompts 11 a.m.: Break 11:10 a.m.: UI streaming, tool calling, and performance optimization 11:50 a.m.: Wrap up All are welcome to attend the session. To actively code along, you'll need a Mac with Apple silicon that supports Apple Intelligence running the latest release of macOS Tahoe 26 and Xcode 26. If you have questions after the code along concludes please share a post here in the forums and engage with the community.

The Core ML developer guide recommends saving reusable compiled Core ML models to a permanent location to avoid unnecessary rebuilds when creating a Core ML model instance. However, there is no location that remains consistent across app updates, since each update changes the UUID associated with the app’s resources path /var/mobile/Containers/Data/Application/<UUID>/Library/Application Support/ As a result, Core ML rebuilds models even if they are unchanged and located in the same relative directory within the app’s file structure.

I have an app that uses a couple of mlmodels (word tagger and gazetteer) and I’m trying to encrypt them before publishing. The models are part of a package. I understand that Xcode can’t automatically handle the encryption for a model in a package the way it can within a traditional app structure. Given that, I’ve generated the Apple MLModel encryption key from Xcode and am encrypting via the command line with: xcrun coremlcompiler compile Gazetteer.mlmodel GazetteerENC.mlmodelc --encrypt Gazetteerkey.mlmodelkey In the package manifest, I’ve listed the encrypted models as .copy resources for my target and have verified the URL to that file is good. When I try to load the encrypted .mlmodelc file (on a physical device) with the line:
 gazetteer = try NLGazetteer(contentsOf: gazetteerURL!) I get the error: Failed to open file: /…/Scanner.bundle/GazetteerENC.mlmodelc/coremldata.bin. It is not a valid .mlmodelc file. So my questions are: Does the NLGazetteer class support encrypted MLModel files? Given that my models are in a package, do I have the right general approach? Thanks for any help or thoughts.

I'm implementing an App Intent for my iOS app that helps users plan trip activities. It only works when run as a shortcut but not using voice through Siri. There are 2 issues: The ShortcutsTripEntity will only accept a voice input for a specific trip but not others. I'm stuck with a throwing error when trying to use requestDisambiguation() on the activity day @Parameter property. How do I rectify these issues. This is blocking me from completing a critical feature that lets users quickly plan activities through Siri and Shortcuts. Expected behavior for trip input: The intent should make Siri accept the spoken trip input from any of the options. Actual behavior for trip input: Siri only accepts the same trip when spoken but accepts any when selected by click/touch. Expected behavior for day input: Siri should accept the spoken selected option. Actual behavior for day input: Siri only accepts an input by click/touch but yet throws an error at runtime I'm happy to provide more code. But here's the relevant code: struct PlanActivityTestIntent: AppIntent { @Parameter(title: "Activity Day") var activityDay: ShortcutsItineraryDayEntity @Parameter( title: "Trip", description: "The trip to plan an activity for", default: ShortcutsTripEntity(id: UUID().uuidString, title: "Untitled trip"), requestValueDialog: "Which trip would you like to add an activity to?" ) var tripEntity: ShortcutsTripEntity @Parameter(title: "Activity Title", description: "The title of the activity", requestValueDialog: "What do you want to do or see?") var title: String @Parameter(title: "Activity Day", description: "Activity Day", default: ShortcutsItineraryDayEntity(itineraryDay: .init(itineraryId: UUID(), date: .now), timeZoneIdentifier: "UTC")) var activityDay: ShortcutsItineraryDayEntity func perform() async throws -> some ProvidesDialog { // ...other code... let tripsStore = TripsStore() // load trips and map them to entities try? await tripsStore.getTrips() let tripsAsEntities = tripsStore.trips.map { trip in let id = trip.id ?? UUID() let title = trip.title return ShortcutsTripEntity(id: id.uuidString, title: title, trip: trip) } // Ask user to select a trip. This line would doesn't accept a voice // answer. Why? let selectedTrip = try await $tripEntity.requestDisambiguation( among: tripsAsEntities, dialog: .init( full: "Which of the \(tripsAsEntities.count) trip would you like to add an activity to?", supporting: "Select a trip", systemImageName: "safari.fill" ) ) // This line throws an error let selectedDay = try await $activityDay.requestDisambiguation( among: daysAsEntities, dialog:"Which day would you like to plan an activity for?" ) } } Here are some related images that might help:

We are really excited to have introduced the Foundation Models framework in WWDC25. When using the framework, you might have feedback about how it can better fit your use cases. Starting in macOS/iOS 26 Beta 4, the best way to provide feedback is to use #Playground in Xcode. To do so: In Xcode, create a playground using #Playground. Fore more information, see Running code snippets using the playground macro. Reproduce the issue by setting up a session and generating a response with your prompt. In the canvas on the right, click the thumbs-up icon to the right of the response. Follow the instructions on the pop-up window and submit your feedback by clicking Share with Apple. Another way to provide your feedback is to file a feedback report with relevant details. Specific to the Foundation Models framework, it’s super important to add the following information in your report: Language model feedback This feedback contains the session transcript, including the instructions, the prompts, the responses, etc. Without that, we can’t reason the model’s behavior, and hence can hardly take any action. Use logFeedbackAttachment(sentiment:issues:desiredOutput: ) to retrieve the feedback data of your current model session, as shown in the usage example, write the data into a file, and then attach the file to your feedback report. If you believe what you’d report is related to the system configuration, please capture a sysdiagnose and attach it to your feedback report as well. The framework is still new. Your actionable feedback helps us evolve the framework quickly, and we appreciate that. Thanks, The Foundation Models framework team