ML Ferret

Ferret is Apple’s end-to-end multimodal large language model designed specifically for flexible referring and grounding: it can understand references of any granularity (boxes, points, free-form regions) and then ground open-vocabulary descriptions back onto the image. The core idea is a hybrid region representation that mixes discrete coordinates with continuous visual features, so the model can fluidly handle “any-form” referring while maintaining precise spatial localization. The repo presents the vision-language pipeline, model assets, and paper resources that show how Ferret answers questions, follows instructions, and returns grounded outputs rather than just text. In practice, this enables tasks like “find that small red icon next to the chart and describe it” where both the linguistic reference and the visual region are ambiguous without fine spatial reasoning.