Posts in category: Apple

*= Equal Contributors
Structured State Spaces for Sequences (S4) is a recently proposed sequence model with successful applications in various tasks, e.g., vision, language modeling, and audio. Thanks to its mathematical formulation, it compresses its input to a single hidden state and is able to capture long-range dependencies while avoiding the need for an attention mechanism. In this work, we apply S4 to Machine Translation (MT) and evaluate several encoder-decoder variants on WMT’14 and WMT’16. In contrast with the success in language modeling, we find that S4 lags behind the Transformer…Apple Machine Learning Research



Virtual assistants are becoming increasingly important speech-driven Information Retrieval platforms that assist users with various tasks. We discuss open problems and challenges with respect to modeling spoken information queries for virtual assistants, and list opportunities where Information Retrieval methods and research can be applied to improve the quality of virtual assistant speech recognition. We discuss how query domain classification, knowledge graphs and user interaction data, and query personalization can be helpful in improving the accurate recognition of spoken information…Apple Machine Learning Research

*=Equal Contributors
There exists a correlation between geospatial activity temporal patterns and type of land use. A novel self-supervised approach is proposed to survey landscape based on activity time series, where time series signal is transformed to frequency domain and compressed into embeddings by a contractive autoencoder, which preserve cyclic temporal patterns observed in time series. The embeddings are input to segmentation neural network for binary classification. Experiments show that the temporal embeddings are effective in classifying residential area and commercial area.Apple Machine Learning Research

*=Equal Contributors
This paper was accepted at the workshop “Trustworthy Machine Learning for Healthcare Workshop” at the conference ICLR 2023.
When analyzing robustness of predictive models under distribution shift, many works focus on tackling generalization in the presence of spurious correlations. In this case, one typically makes use of covariates or environment indicators to enforce independencies in learned models to guarantee generalization under various distribution shifts. In this work, we analyze a class of distribution shifts, where such independencies are not desirable, as…Apple Machine Learning Research

Real world images often have highly imbalanced content density. Some areas are very uniform, e.g., large patches of blue sky, while other areas are scattered with many small objects. Yet, the commonly used successive grid downsampling strategy in convolutional deep networks treats all areas equally. Hence, small objects are represented in very few spatial locations, leading to worse results in tasks such as segmentation. Intuitively, retaining more pixels representing small objects during downsampling helps to preserve important information. To achieve this, we propose AutoFocusFormer (AFF), a…Apple Machine Learning Research

This work investigates pre-trained audio representations for few shot Sound Event Detection. We specifically address the task of few shot detection of novel acoustic sequences, or sound events with semantically meaningful temporal structure, without assuming access to non-target audio. We develop procedures for pre-training suitable representations, and methods which transfer them to our few shot learning scenario. Our experiments evaluate the general purpose utility of our pre-trained representations on AudioSet, and the utility of proposed few shot methods via tasks constructed from…Apple Machine Learning Research

Apple Machine Learning Research

Existing novice-friendly machine learning (ML) modeling tools center around a solo user experience, where a single user collects only their own data to build a model. However, solo modeling experiences limit valuable opportunities for encountering alternative ideas and approaches that can arise when learners work together; consequently, it often precludes encountering critical issues in ML around data representation and diversity that can surface when different perspectives are manifested in a group-constructed data set. To address this issue, we created Co-ML – a tablet-based app for learners…Apple Machine Learning Research

Diffusion models (DMs) have recently emerged as SoTA tools for generative modeling in various domains. Standard DMs can be viewed as an instantiation of hierarchical variational autoencoders (VAEs) where the latent variables are inferred from input-centered Gaussian distributions with fixed scales and variances. Unlike VAEs, this formulation constrains DMs from changing the latent spaces and learning abstract representations. In this work, we propose f-DM, a generalized family of DMs which allows progressive signal transformation. More precisely, we extend DMs to incorporate a set of…Apple Machine Learning Research

Apple Machine Learning Research